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Two innovative professors at the University of North Carolina Wilmington have been awarded the second place honor in the AT&T Inc. first Big Mobile On Campus Challenge, a national higher education contest for creative mobile application development. UNC Wilmington faculty Jeff Brown and Ron Vetter competed against Stanford University, the University of California Berkeley, Georgia Tech and numerous other prestigious colleges.
The UNCW team was honored for the interactive mobile program "Dub Hunt," a scavenger hunt game for university students using text messages.
Brown, inspired by his daughter, who was entering college for the first time, developed Dub Hunt to help foster a greater sense of campus community for new students. Brown noted that his personal experiences led him to consider the challenges new students experience in their first year of college.
Dub Hunt is a scavenger hunt game in which teams of students receive text message questions about the UNCW campus. As teams find answers, they text them and the game software evaluates their answers for correctness. The UNCW Division of Student Affairs, the Office of Transition Programs and student orientation leaders helped to design questions for the database and test early versions of the game.
The game is one of the many components of Mobile Education, LLC, a company founded in 2007 by owners Vetter and Brown in partnership with UNCW. Mobile Education develops interactive text message applications for the UNCW community, such as the ability to request and retrieve a grade, campus event calendar listings, dining and retail coupons, shuttle bus locations, and more.
The mobile challenge was established to identify innovative and creative mobile applications that enhance academic performance, build campus community and help improve campus security operations.
Vetter, professor of computer science, said "Winning this award is exciting because it demonstrates that innovative technology developments are happening at UNCW and that those developments are on par with efforts across the country."
