HyperionDev has announced the winners of its #ChangeWithCode scholarship competition.
HyperionDev launched the competition to offer inspired South Africans the chance to share their great tech ideas, and win one of three coding bootcamp scholarships to the total value of R45 000 each.
Winners were chosen by a judging panel consisting of Wesley Lynch of Snapplify, David Torr of UCOOK, Justin Norman from The Flip Africa, Andrew Smith of Yuppiechef and Sam Wright @TechGirlZA.
“It was really fun and inspiring to see so many great ideas and audacious individual participants,” says Norman.
The competition saw nearly 100 valid entrants, with a plethora of forward-thinking ideas.
“The competition has shown off the immense talent in South Africa and the hunger of both young and old to solve everyday problems with tech. It’s inspiring and exciting, especially at a time when innovation and creativity is so desperately needed to solve issues like unemployment,” says Riaz Moola, founder and CEO of HyperionDev.
The judges had to score out of five, on three criteria:
* Community impact – how powerful is the idea’s capacity for changing its community?
* Feasibility – how easily can this idea be created and implemented?
* Scalability – how well can this idea be extended to other communities, or include more features?
“The breadth of submissions has been incredible and spans everything from biodegradable drones to coding software for the disabled,” explains Moola.
He says that the judges were given a list of the top 10 submissions to choose from.
The three official winners of the #ChangeWithCode competition are:
* Virtual education platform with gamification by John-Paul Robert Andrew aka @JPAndrew. This is a platform that uses gamification techniques to get learners hooked on the reward feedback loop which ensures they play more and therefore, learn more.
* Accessible credit scoring platform by Justin Swart aka @JustSwart. This platform offers South Africans access to a credit scoring platform, which is fundamental to accessing affordable financial capital.
* Payment, chat and scheduling app for Metrorail by Regan Jansen aka @reganjansen33. Named ‘Trainbuddy’, the app hopes to alleviate the long queues for ticket purchasing and GPS tracking to see exactly where specific trains are located on the route.