Being a college student is a juggling act. That’s why the inaugural Hack-the-Dorm with Amazon Alexa contest, in collaboration with MindSumo, challenged students to build a new voice controlled Alexa skill to help make life easier and better on campus. A big thank you to the teams of students who submitted their creative and useful skills for the dorm using the Alexa Skills Kit.

The Winners

It was a tough choice, all of the submissions we reviewed were innovative and creative. Using the contest judging criteria to review entries, we are pleased to announce the winners of this contest. Congratulations to:

First Place:

Dorm Event created by Nitin Surana from the University of Southern California. Dorm Events is a skill that can inform students about events going on around campus through a Facebook integration. 

Second Place:

CourseTracker created by Sai Pathuri from the University of Texas at Dallas. CourseTracker is a skill meant to be an easy-to-use assignment tracker for students to use while at school.

Third Place:

Obie Food, created by Jen Crainic from Oberlin College. Obie Food is a skill meant to provide students with an easy way to learn what is on their cafeteria’s menu for the day.

The winners of this contest and the first 10 eligible submissions will be notified by MindSumo to receive their prizes. Participants who published a new skill for Amazon Alexa may also be eligible to receive an Alexa Developer Hoodie (Terms & Conditions apply).

Thank you to everyone who participated in this first Hack-the-Dorm contest. We invite you to follow us on MindSumo to hear about future contests and share your #AlexaDevStory on Twitter to keep the conversation going.

Alexa <3 Students

In 2016, we announced echosim.io by iQuarius Media, a browser-based interface to Alexa, to allow developers who are working with the Alexa Skills Kit to test skills in development. We announced the Amazon Alexa Prize, a $2.5 million competition to advance conversational AI. And we taught thousands of students at developer events and hackathons how to build their first Alexa Skills. If you are as energized as we are about this shift in technology, get started with Alexa today. As we often say at Amazon, it’s always Day 1 and there is so much more to do.

About the Alexa Skills Kit

The Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) enables developers to easily build capabilities, called skills, for Alexa. ASK includes self-service APIs, documentation, templates, and code samples to get developers on a rapid road to publishing their Alexa skills.