INTERalliance Students Become 'Zakta Zombies!' 19 INTERalliance Students Each Win a 16GB iPod Touch!
On Thursday, October 30th, participants in the Zakta Guide Contest, sponsored by INTERalliance, Vora Technologies, Zakta, the UC College of Business Information Systems Department, and the Theater Department of Mother of Mercy High School, gathered at Vora Technology Park in Hamilton to attend the awards ceremony and to celebrate the closure of this successful contest. On this dark night before Halloween, the party location was spookily decorated, complete with a graveyard. All attendees sported equally frightening zombie attire. Nineteen students were awarded a 16GB iPod Touch for successful participation in the contest. 420 guides were generated by contest participants.
The task for these students was to create indexes of useful search results, called Zakta Guides, for a new search engine that is currently in beta test. The submitted contest entry Guides were judged by 22 students of the Information Systems Department from the University of Cincinnati College of Business, who participated in their own competition and split an $800 pot.
With eleven INTERalliance member high schools participating, the winners included Andrew Beckmann, Kyle Gundrum, and Alex Finch from Summit Country Day, Paolo Gabriel and Hilary Egan from Sycamore, Carling Andrews and Kendall Sherman from St. Ursula, Huyen Do from Lakota West, Max Wood from Moeller, Kelsey Ryan from Mount Notre Dame, Jeff Laake from Elder, Laura Mahon from Madeira, Katie Burns from Purcell Marian, and Ryan Finke from St. Xavier. Additionally, five students from Mason decided to take things up a notch and automate the guide creation process. Each one of them - Kevin Bradley, Sam Lyon, Suprasanna Mishra, Kunal Sennivasan, and Jenny Liao - was awarded an iPod in recognition of their creativity and diligence. These students from Mason generated a whopping 201 accepted guides. Great stuff for Zakta to use when it goes to market... great experience for the INTERalliance members... great prizes!... great party to wrap it all up!
