Substance Dominates in Pointwest’s Android Challenge

Jig
October 24, 2012

Manila, Philippines — Purpose and ease of use take center stage in Pointwest’s Android Challenge. While each had a sleek design, the winning apps were clearly more about substance than style, focusing on community safety, education, and logical operations.

The criteria used for judging consisted of basic metrics, like code quality and UI aesthetics, but the potential of the winning apps to be useful to the community certainly added more value.

 

Be SAFE
Speedy Alert for Emergency (First place with a cash prize of PHP5,000)

Developed by John Asilo and Emir Orpilla, SAFE (Speedy Alert for Emergency) is a notification system application. It sends alerts to multiple users in the shortest possible time during natural disasters, accidents, and medical emergencies.

Aside from message delivery to multiple users, the app also features the ability to send alerts to actual emergency hotlines, the configuration of emergency events (predefined events), and the automatic creation of messages/ alerts.

Speech input, which utilizes Google’s Speech-to-Text, activates alerts for a predefined event. Alerts contain the user’s latest location via GPS, a handy feature, especially if an emergency occurs in a place the user isn’t familiar with.

 

Learning Made Fun
Mr Lloyd’s Playschool (Second place with a cash prize of PHP3,000)

Developed by Stephen Hila, Jason Manzala, and Reycie Rodriguez, Mr Lloyd’s Playschool is an educational app aimed at helping children aged 2 to 5 years to learn basics like numbers and the alphabet. It also “teaches” English and Math, and features quizzes with vivid colors and engaging pictures.

Mr Lloyd’s Playschool stores user details, quiz questions and answers, as well as milestones and achievements. The last two can earn your child some bragging rights, since the app also enables users to post achievements on Facebook.

 

Follow the Light
Light Me Up (Third place with a cash prize of PHP2,000)

Developed by Kevin Aladin and Herbert Sayco, Light Me Up is a game app that uses the concept of logic gates as its basis. The objective of the game is to light up the LED using available logic gates and switches.

Scores for each level are determined by the length of time the user took to light up the LED and finish the game. High scores can be shared on Twitter.

 

The winning apps will be published on the Mobile Group’s internal Google Site, so the rest of the Pointwest community can download and test them.

The Android Challenge, which consisted of a boot camp and contest, is the first mobile challenge Pointwest has organized. With the amount of interest it garnered from the community, the event could well turn into an annual company-wide competition.