Team of Brescia students place first WMGIC competition

A team of four students from Brescia University in Owensboro recently won a global intercollegiate competition organized by The College of William and Mary in Virginia called the Global Innovation Challenge.

The College of William and Mary’s Global Innovation Challenge (WMGIC) is a hackathon-style international and sustainable development case competition aimed at encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration to create innovative solutions for current global issues. A hackathon is described as an event, typically lasting several days, where individuals come together to collaborate to solve a problem or identify new opportunities. It’s a portmanteau of the words “hack” and “marathon.”

The team of Brescia students, Juan Tavera, Nevaeh DeArmond, Emilee Clark and Eli Mongare, were tasked with providing a solution to Zambia’s mining practices for this spring’s challenge.

“This is our second full year participating in the competition,” said faculty sponsor Dr. Anna Kuthy.

Kuthy explained that she helped organize the team of students before the event, and helped them analyze what each of them bring to the table so that the entire team could benefit from each team members’ strengths.

“We’ll get together for dinner a few nights before the competition, and we’ll talk more in general terms, like what each team member feels are his or her strengths and weaknesses, so they kind of have roles already established before they are assigned the ‘problem’,” Kuthy said.

The competition itself begins around 4 p.m. on Friday afternoon when the teams are assigned a problem. This year 32 teams from 24 universities worldwide including the College of William and Mary, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, Nottingham Trent from England, Brown, Uconn and California at Santa Barbara to name a few, addressed finding a solution to the future of Zambia’s mining practices.

After the problem is assigned, the group works through the night to form a plan to address the problem. Team members meet with designated mentors, noted people in business or professionals working in public policy, for two 15-minute sessions during the night to discuss their plans and any problems or issues they might be encountering while working to organize a solution.

Kuthy said that she’s around during the process to provide moral support and caffeine, but that she tries to take a backseat and let the students lead the work.

“I’m here to provide the coffee, the energy drinks, the chicken nuggets, whatever they need to keep them focused and on track while they work,” she said.

The competition concludes between 11 a.m. and noon on Saturday when each group is required to give a 12-minute presentation that sums up the groups’ findings and overall solution to the assigned problem.

“So, not only is this an exercise in critical thinking and problem solving,” Kuthy explained, “but the team must work together to provide a logical solution to the problem and then they must eloquently present their findings to the judges.

We had an instance in the past where a presenter got nervous and fumbled during the presentation, so, while our team had a great solution, the team didn’t win because the complete package wasn’t there.”

The College of William and Mary hosts this competition twice a year, once in the spring and once in the fall. The fall event is usually a collaboration with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and usually addresses some sort of misinformation in the human security field.

“So, we’ve seen topics like finding solutions on gender violence and Russian misinformation in regards to the war in Ukraine,” Kuthy said.

Judges then conclude the competition by announcing a winner in three categories around 2 to 3 p.m. that Saturday.

Brescia’s team won this spring’s competition in the governance category.

Then, the winning teams condense their solutions and findings into a three-minute presentation which they give to the audience of teams and mentors during the competition’s closing ceremony.

“I’m very proud of our Brescia team,” Kuthy said.

“They found ways to work together through adversity to find a solution to the problem, all while strengthening their skills and making connections with mentors that could lead to future opportunities. The competition, overall, is such a great experience for everyone involved.”