Jake Magida will spend the next two days planning and pitching ideas to employees from MLB.com who are giving him real-world technological problems to solve.

Magida is participating in a contest called the MLB.com College Challenge, which will be held at Syracuse University for the third consecutive year on Thursday and Friday. And although Magida won’t sleep for two days, he said it’s more fun that way.

“When you are working on the fly and doing things as you go, it forces you to be more creative,” said Magida, a sophomore in the School of Information Studies.

The event will begin Thursday at 6:30 p.m. with a kickoff dinner at Club 44 in the Carrier Dome. It will be followed by an all-night competition, from 8:30 p.m. until 2 p.m. the following day in the iSchool, according to the MLB.com College Challenge website.

At 4 p.m. on Friday, students will arrive at Alliance Bank Stadium, the Syracuse Chiefs’ stadium, to pitch their ideas to MLB.com employees. After the students pitch their ideas they will have a celebratory dinner and the winner will be announced, according to the website.

The grand prize consists of a paid trip to New York City for a behind-the-scenes tour of MLB.com’s headquarters in New York City and lunch with MLB.com employees.

Magida said he likes the many opportunities to interact with MLB.com employees that the schedule of events gives him.

“I’m most excited just to talk to the guys from MLB and bounce ideas off of them,” he said. “They were awesome and insightful last year.”

More students registered this year for the event than any other year, said Julie Walas, the undergraduate programs manager of the iSchool who has played a leading role in developing the MLB.com contest.

This year there are 81 students registered and 22 teams compared to 77 students and 16 teams last year, Walas said.

This year, Walas said, the product students must come up with will focus on a new trend in many technological developments called gamification, which provides game-like experiences within websites or other services such as point systems.

The competition originated back in 2008 when iSchool graduate Josh Frost got a job with MLB.com, said iSchool associate professor Jeffrey Rubin, who works to recruit and guide students through the MLB.com Challenge.

“About six months after Josh was working for MLB.com, one of his superiors came to me and asked, ‘How can we find more Josh Frosts?’” Rubin said.

Rubin and Walas then came up with the MLB.com competition, which became a way for MLB.com to recruit the iSchool’s best and brightest, Rubin said.

Marc Squire, the first winner of the MLB.com Challenge in 2010 who now works for MLB.com as a web designer, said he was able to use web design skills he acquired from an iSchool class when he competed.

He also said he thinks the changes to the challenge, like having less time to produce ideas, have given students more opportunities to be innovative.

“I think it is more challenging,” he said, “But it allows students to be more creative without having pre-designed tasks to solve.”

 

Published on November 29, 2012 at 12:53 am

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