First year students Steph and Chris share their personal experiences of the University of Central Lancashire’s (UCLan) annual event
The 4 Week Challenge once again galvanized UCLan’s newest computing students as they began their studies with a competition to design, develop and market their own treasure hunt apps.
For the seventh year in a row, first year students from the range of computing-based courses were thrown together to design and develop a new app and then create a marketing campaign to promote it. The winning team was announced at a symposium at the end of the four weeks with ‘See One’ coming out on top.
Steph Paul, a 29-year-old forensic computing student and computer network technology student Chris Burns, 24, were part of the winning team.
Steph said: “The 4 Week Challenge has been a fun experience for me and a great start to university; something that I wouldn’t have had the chance to do back home. It has been interesting working together in a team as we were all very different with diverse skills sets. Right from the start, we had the mind-set that we could win this challenge with a lot of hard work and some luck."
"The highlight over the four weeks has been seeing the app develop into the end product and the symposium, where we got to showcase it. It is a fantastic way to start off university; getting to make friends and getting to know the lecturers really well."
“Our app was a treasure hunt quiz around Preston with the theme of space. This was unique as no other team had thought of this and it worked fantastically in the symposium to showcase our app. All our marketing across social media was space themed and we also had one team member dress up as an astronaut on the day of the symposium.
“The highlight over the four weeks has been seeing the app develop into the end product and the symposium, where we got to showcase it. It is a fantastic way to start off university; getting to make friends and getting to know the lecturers really well.”
Chris said: “The 4 Week Challenge was amazing. It was fun, challenging, and quite intense. I went into it knowing nothing at all and surprised myself by coming out of it having built something that worked and feeling confident moving forwards. This is my second time at university and nothing on my old course grabbed my attention and got me invested and working hard like the 4 Week Challenge. You can really tell that the lecturers put a lot of work into making it as fun and interesting as possible. My favourite part of the whole thing was the atmosphere of friendly competition between all the teams - everybody got along and helped each other out.”
View photos from the event’s symposium on the UCLan Flickr gallery.