It is always amazing to see how things can come together to allow an event to happen, if with technical difficulties, and even complete failures. Yet despite some of these setbacks, the ELEVATE finals happened, and we have a winner!
Very similar to the ELEVATE competition that happened a few weeks ago, the Finals are a place for the top 5 teams to present to a panel of judges consisting of members of BYU-I faculty. We had 6 judges to help determine which of the ideas from the finalists could be presented to the President Executive Group (PEG) for the possibility of the ideas being implemented into BYU-I. The 5 finalist teams had a week from the first competition to review, reflect, and refine their presentations for the chance to win at the Finals. Of course, not everything went smoothly, but we were able to make it work.
The hardest challenge was making it possible for people to present over Zoom and in person at the same time, while also allowing the audience to join in and view from Zoom as well. The reason it was set up this way was to allow people to see the presentations, while also keeping people safe during this pandemic by not smashing tons of people into the same room. I spent about an hour trying everything to get things all set up for the presentations, and with the help of the AV crew on campus, we were finally able to start, albeit 15 mins late.
Our panel of judges
The presentations then went on for the next hour or so, which consisted of the presenting of the idea, and then a Question-and-Answer section from the judges. After the final team presented, the judges came together and determined a winner. The winner for this semesters ELEVATE competition was Inukshuk, an app that could be created to help students keep track and record their progress on the journey to find balance. Not only did they win the competition, but they also won some cool prizes from the BYU-I bookstore.
Team: Inukshuk
I am very grateful to see the “final” event of this semesters ELEVATE finally come to fruition. One may say that we are done, but now we get the opportunity to start planning for the next ELEVATE competition for Social Change!
