The Sorenson Center for Discovery and Innovation at the David Eccles Business School along with the Center for Medical Innovation and Entertainment and Media Arts Engineering School at the University of Utah have come together to form the Games4Health Challenges that run the course for the academic year. The main objective of these challenges is to revolutionize and disrupt health and wellness by using digital technologies from apps to games that transform our experiences and expectations.
There are four events that lead to the Grand Prix challenge in March 2015. The four events will support the students in ideating, refining and developing their games or apps over the course of the academic year. This year will increase the total value of awards to more than $30,000 across four events. All events are open to all students in any discipline from anywhere in the world. This is a great way for creative, innovative students to make a difference especially in the healthcare space.
More at g4h.business.utah.edu.
Important Dates
- Hack-a-thon (Sept. 11-12, 2014)
- FrankenApp (Oct. 21, 2014)
- Shark Tank (Jan. 20, 2015)
- G4H GrandPrix (March 24, 2014)
About the Challenges
G4H Hack-a-thon (Sept. 11-12, 2014) – Prize awards ~ $10,000
Co-sponsored with the Entrepreneur Club of the David Eccles School of Business, this is a two day event to germinate and sprout ideas from young minds. This event is an innovation tournament and a hack-a-thon that provides sponsored challenges from industry partners as well as allowing all participants to develop their own ideas. Students can then take these ideas further to develop a business and compete in the other challenges.
G4H FrankenApp (Oct. 21, 2014) – Prize awards ~ $1000
What if Candy Crush and WebMD had a baby? It would be quite a killer app. This event is to encourage students to look at all the successful apps in the market and combine the best features and experiences and become app surgeons to create a FrankenApp that brings the best from each app into an entirely new creation. Students will choose an industry from the list provided to focus a new app on. They will form a team and choose an industry. Then they will assess the current apps on the market, define what critical problem is still not being addressed and then build an app wireframe using a tool called balsamiq. At the end of the event the team will present the app to a panel of judges.There are cash prizes total worth $1000. They can then go on to participate in other challenges Get Seeded, Bench2Bedside and Games4Health Grand Prix.
G4H Shark Tank (Jan. 20, 2015) – Prize awards ~ $10,000
Great ideas don’t always lead to valuable innovations. At this event students can pitch their refined and improved ideas developed in the previous two events, or present an entirely new one, to be evaluated by our panel of professional innovators and investors to see how to improve them for our final event in March.
G4H Grand Prix (March 24, 2015) – Prize awards ~ $25,000
The annual gala brings enterprising students from any discipline and campus to compete with either (1)working beta app or game or (2) video storyboard of your app or game idea. Each entry must present a 500-word description of the business model for their game or app as well as a 500-word description of clinical trial they would run to demonstrate its clinical and economic efficacy.
