Food Insecurity App Built by a Team of UC Berkeley Students Wins Modo Ideathon, National App-Building Competition

Modo Labs®, creator of the leading no-code app building platform for higher education and for enterprise applications, announced the winner of the 2019 national student Ideathon competition. The national competition concluded a year-long series of regional app-building Ideathons organized and run by schools across the country. During these events, students from varied academic backgrounds and with no prior coding experience, built their ideas into apps within a 24-hour period using the Modo Campus platform. Click to Tweet.

The Modo Ideathon was developed to encourage students from all academic backgrounds, regardless of technical ability, to create apps addressing challenges students face on their campuses. Due to the Modo no-code app building platform's intuitive design, students with no previous technical experience can quickly create apps that address their college or university's specific needs while also maintaining the school's brand. The Ideathon provides a platform to recognize these students' efforts on their campuses, and in the higher ed and mobile-first communities.

More than 240 students from over 25 majors representing eight colleges and universities competed in the Ideathon series. Students worked for 24 hours straight. A winning team was chosen from each institution. Finalists presented their apps to the review committee comprised of two judges from Modo, Dan Jamara and Roderick Ibe, and two external judges, Robert Birkline of the University of Houston and Stephanie Obodda of Brown University. During this year's Kurogo Mobile Conference, the Ideathon winner was presented with a national prize of $10,000.00, courtesy of AWS Educate, a global initiative created by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide students and educators with the resources needed to accelerate cloud-related learning.

"Mobile is the channel of choice for today's students," said Mike Cannady, Head of U.S. Education Partners, Amazon Web Services, Inc. "We are pleased to work with Modo Labs to help students bring a wide array of inspirational ideas and solutions to their institutions, all created by non-technical developers."

The winning app was developed by University of California, Berkeley students Saahil Chadha, Jago Pang, and Neha Nagabothu. Their app, Bear Appétit, tackles food insecurity through the anonymous donation of meal swipes, between those who need them and those who have swipes to share. It also gives access to local resources such as the local food pantry and food assistance programs.

"Competing was fun and eye-opening. Seeing how I could so quickly develop an app to address a campus need I knew existed, was empowering," said one of the UC Berkeley team members, Saahil Chadha. "I came away from the event feeling very accomplished because I'd gone from recognizing an issue in the community to creating a solution for it over the course of just two days."

See highlights from this year of Ideathon competitions or read more about the kickoff competition here. Colleges interested in participating in Ideathon 2020 may email Ana Sanchez at [email protected].

About Modo Labs

Trusted by hundreds of the world's most recognized universities and brands from around the world, the Modo no-code app platform offers enterprise-scale mobile engagement and communication capabilities that allow users to quickly and easily build unified mobile campus and workplace experiences that increase connectivity for employees, students, faculty, and guests. Using Modo, customers quickly unlock innovation and digitally transform their organizations by empowering the domain expertise of any person within their organization, regardless of technical skill set. For more information, visit modolabs.com, @ModoLabs

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