The UK’s First Sports Hackathon Launches with £10,000 Bursary on Offer
August 6, 2015
Twenty-four hours is all that separates the nation’s brightest mobile developers and hackers from possibly delivering the sports equivalent of Facebook or Snapchat and getting a new generation playing sport.
The Sport England Sport Technology Awards Hackathon, ed which takes place over 25 hours on 2 – 3 October 2015, try will challenge coders from all walks of life to create an app that facilitates social change through sport.
Teams of up to six people, recipe including at least one woman, need to develop a concept that encourages a particular demographic group to be more physically active – the exact profile of the target market will be revealed to the teams on the day.
Teams will have 24 hours to determine their concept and an initial prototype, with the last hour of the Hackathon given over to concept presentation and judging.
From this, the best three ideas will be selected and the winning concept will be announced at The Sports Technology Awards in April 2016.
Sport England’s Director of Business Partnerships Tanya Joseph said ‘Sport and technology both have an amazing power to bring together people from different backgrounds. I am hoping that the combination of the two will have a real impact.
The Hackathon will use this generation’s tech gurus to create an app to benefit the next generation. We encourage anyone with any coding or app development skills to get involved and be a part of this exciting initiative.’
Rebecca Hopkins, CEO of The Sports Technology Awards, added ‘The Hackathon is an exciting move forward both for the awards and the sports tech sector.
Thanks to Sport England, we have been able to create an element of the awards that have real purpose and reflect the fact that we are at the heart of change within the sector.
We are very excited to see what the coders devise – and who knows, once the app has been fully developed, we may yet see the winner back at future Sports Technology Awards.’
The Hackathon is free to enter and is open to all UK residents over the age of 18. Applications to take part close at 5pm on 7 September 2015 with successful teams having their place on the Hackathon confirmed on 11 September 2016.
To enter, register your interest here and a member of the Sports Technology Hackathon team will be in touch shortly.
For more information, please contact Yasmin Patel onYasmin@sportstechnologyawards.