What is the ECCE App Challenge?

The ECCE App Challenge is a coding competition held by Esri Canada to help promote innovation and creativity within the Centres of Excellence. Each year, teams of students at ECCE schools across Canada are tasked to create new and unique apps powered by Esri technology and open data to help address a problem related to a specific theme.

The App Challenge for 2019 took place between February 15th and April 5th. Teams at each school were given one week to complete their apps, and to submit their source code accompanied by supporting documentation, team profiles, and a video sales pitch for their app. These were assembled and hosted in a GitHub repository used by the ECCE to showcase the apps created by each team, alongside previous years’ entries that may be viewed from the ECCE GitHub account homepage. You can view the source code of each app submitted, and starting with the 2017 challenge, you can view profiles of teams, access their video presentations via YouTube, and interact with live demos of their apps.

Three external judges were invited to evaluate all of the teams’ submitted apps, documentation, and videos. Aggregated results were then used to rank the teams submissions, and select the winners with the best overall scores.

Final Results

After this year’s App Challenge 2019 concluded on April 5th, and the three external judges reviewed all of the teams’ projects, their results were aggregated and used to rank the teams submissions, and select the winners with the best overall scores:

 

The winning team for 2019 is:

SpectaculAR from University of Waterloo

 

Esri Canada is pleased to congratulate Jaydeep Mistry, Juan Carrillo, Fraser King, and Manpreet Singh Chahal, who win a trip to this year’s Esri User Conference in San Diego. Honourable mentions also go to the first and second runners-up:

GISquad, by Matthew Brown, Michele Tsang, and Anastassios Dardas at McMaster University
Baes of Fundy, by Liam Gowan, Dani Kogan, Kaleb McNeil, and Andrea Zagar

About the Challenge

Challenge Guidelines

How do I register?

In order to register your team for the ECCE App Challenge, you must contact the ECCE director at your school. Provide your director with the names and email addresses of your team members, and choose a team name.

What can I win?

After the judges have reviewed all of the submitted apps, a winning team will be chosen. Winners will be awarded an all expenses paid trip for all team members to the Esri User Conference in San Diego, California (July 8-12, 2019).

What’s Github?

Github is a website and hosting service based on the Git distributed revision control system. It allows you to easily share code and facilitates collaborative software development. You may create your own Github account so that you can easily download and contribute to open source projects. You may use GitHub to manage the source code with your team for the app challenge, however please keep your project repository private until all submissions have been posted to the ECCE GitHub repository first after March 29th.

How do I submit my app?

Please email a zip file containing your app and all of the required deliverables to ecce@esri.ca (if necessary, coordinate with us if you need to exchange large files or share access to a private GitHub repository). Once all submissions have been received from teams at all schools, they will be published in the the ECCE App Challenge 2019 Github repository.

Who are the judges?

Three individuals from key areas of education and industry were selected to volunteer as judges for this year’s App Challenge:

What are “open data”, and where can I get them?

Open data are freely available data sets that anybody can use without restrictions. There are many different sources where you can obtain open data from, for example:

Where should I start..?

We’ve put together a series of videos to help you get started with the ECCE App Challenge.

Please take the time to watch the whole series before you get started building your apps so that you are familiar with the many options available for creating content and building apps with the ArcGIS platform, and to ensure that you are able to share your apps with us when you are finished:

 

Please subscribe to the Esri Canada Centres of Excellence YouTube channel to keep up to date with the latest ECCE videos.

Once you and your team have come up with a general idea for your app, one of the best places to start would be the ECCE Resources page. You can find many useful developer-oriented materials to help you build your app by using the tags listed to filter resources. You can also check out some of the example projects from past App Challenges hosted on the ECCE Github page for inspiration. Lastly, if you need help to develop your strategy to succeed in the App Challenge, consider watching the free ArcGIS App Strategies training seminar.

Questions?

If you have any questions related to the ECCE App Challenge, please contact the ECCE directors at your school, or email us at (ecce@esri.ca).

Good luck!