Alexander Mishchenko on his way to win the contest "Your Move" with the project "ZaDvizh!
In our project I am the leader. Besides me, there are 4 more people in the team: one guy from Politech - Roman Garmashev, and the rest are from different cities and universities.
In April we all met at the Hackathon of "Your Move" (All-Russian student contest), which was held remotely for 24 hours. And it was there that our idea was born.
We proceeded from what we are most unhappy with in the university, what problem we are concerned about. And this problem had to be solvable. Each of us identified that in higher education institutions centralized communication with students about the associations / clubs and activities is very underdeveloped. Available information is poorly structured and their location is chaotic.
At the end of the Hackathon we took 9th place out of 108 (!) teams.
Next we decided not to stop and continue to develop our idea. We decided to participate in the competition "Your Move" in the track "I make" - this is an area where you need to bring your idea to implementation, and most importantly, that it would be useful to the student community.
We spent the whole of May preparing the passport of our project. It was important to map the specific target audience and their needs. It was necessary to identify the narrow problem and ways to solve it, as well as the long-term goals of the project. To do this, surveys were conducted, problem interviews were conducted, and a lot of analytical work was done. And that's not to mention the qualitative and quantitative indicators, which we painted over several months in advance.
Having analyzed students' responses, we realized that it is very important for them to receive all the most important information about associations and events as quickly as possible and in an accessible way, without unnecessary action.
The best solution for this turned out to be the creation of a Telegram bot, which would contain succinct and structured information. We thought it was equally important to create a VKontakte group. As it turned out later, our project is not only a source of information, it also allows us to motivate and inspire students to create something new in their university. After all, we give information not only to students about their university. We allow students from all over the country to learn about various activities and associations at many other universities, which certainly provides an opportunity to find interesting ideas for themselves and implement them at home. In addition, it allows the exchange of experiences and ideas.
After submitting the application, it was important to work on the project for a few months, as participants were not informed until early September about their progress to the next stage.
I took all the responsibility for creating the telegram bot. None of us was a programmer, and it was me who was most enthusiastic about the idea. But, as it turned out, learning the programming language from scratch and "coding" such a complicated bot in such a short time is quite difficult.
I had to combine the exams, and then the daily work. When in the evening I had no energy at all, and I felt incredibly sleepy, it was not an easy task to force myself to sit down and tackle all sorts of difficulties. But I knew from the beginning why I wanted to do it, so even after a lot of moments when I wanted to quit, I continued.
As a result, by mid-August I already had a working Telegram bot, which I had to fill with information, and in which I had to fix all the bugs and errors. Around the beginning of August I started putting the team to work. I allocated who should look for which information, which resources to use, what to improve or change. We also started thinking about the design, description and overall image of our product. September 11 we announced in our VKontakte group that our telegram bot was ready for use.
By this time the evaluation of our passport had arrived. We passed to the next, full-time stage. We did not have a lot of points for the first stage, but also not too little, so in order to win it was extremely important to do everything possible to express ourselves at maximum in the second stage - there we defend our project and present the results to the jury.
Since September and up to October 15 there was a period of sleepless nights, constant worrying, consulting with experts, finalizing the project, participation in the pitching hackathon, and daily rehearsals of his speech.
Everything was done. Every second of the performance was thought out, the preparation for the answers to the questions of the jury was in full swing. As a result, on October 16 the jury commended my performance and said to wait for the results.
At the end of November we learned the results. And it was incredible!
183 points out of 190. It was just "wow".
Then we were invited to the Russian Student Forum, a gala concert, where I was awarded a statuette of the winner by the Minister of Science and Higher Education Valery Falkov. Also we got into the top twenty projects that were awarded by Rosatom, and for that we were given a trip to Nizhny Novgorod - Sarov.
Website of the project - http://za.dvizh.tilda.ws/
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