A learning app that helps young soccer players learn the history, science and rules behind “the beautiful game” scored a win and $2,250 for a University of Georgia team at this year’s Design Sprint Contest. 

Soccora, introduced by international affairs junior Kaiya Davis, intended MIS major Hunter Fennel, and finance senior John Hana, teaches young soccer players the sport’s background, rules and history to turn them into lifelong fans. 

“Coaches would have the ability to assign everybody group work outside of the field so they can use valuable practice time to run the drills needed to build the best players possible,” Fennel told the judges. “Soccora helps players develop a deeper understanding and puts the learning aspect of the sport into a community that parents already trust.” 

This was the seventh year the UGA Entrepreneurship Program hosted the Summer Design Sprint. The six-week program, open to all UGA students, is an intensive crash course in design thinking, said Don Chambers, program facilitator and associate director of the Entrepreneurship Program. Students identify a problem, conduct on-the-ground research to develop a solution, and create a detailed plan or prototype. 

While 24 students started the Summer Design Sprint process in June, only 10 students — comprising five teams — were selected to pitch to the judges. 
 
This year’s judges included UGA engineering professor Jaime Camelio, director of the Georgia Network for Electric Mobility, and student judges Aashna Raj, UGA Kickstart Fund co-managing director, and Kickstart Fund members Harshil Joshi and Brooke Richards.   

In addition to Soccora, judges recognized Legacy Link, an app that helps companies document the institutional knowledge of retiring workers. Intended business juniors Jason Ingeyous and Alexander Martinescu took home a $750 second-place prize.   

The three other teams represented in the finals included: 

• NAVI, an interactive app serving as a personal guide to first-generation college students navigating the application and financial aid processes. It was created by landscape architecture junior Breanna Crawford and electrical engineering junior Joseph Rodelas. 

• News Stamp, a social media-style news aggregator site allowing local news outlets to pool resources to draw a larger audience to their stories, was created by MBA student Anthony Paz. 

• Treeroot, a referral-tracking platform that helps small service businesses generate customers by making word-of-mouth referrals easy to track and reward, was created by MIS senior Soham Joshi and computer engineering junior Tanish Murali Reddy.