So this week we had a very busy week and we crammed a lot into the 5 days stretching Oct 27th-31st, including:

• Mid-term for CBU Biz Course
• Dragon’s Den type pitch with a mentor
• SPARK Cape Breton – Business Idea Competition Submission
• 2-Day Hackathon at UIT
• Halloween….

One of the most valuable and humbling experiences was definitely the visit from Permjot Valia on Wednesday. He gave us tremendous feedback and critique of our projects/ideas.

Also at 5pm that day was the closing for the SPARK Cape Breton business idea competition for the best early stage technology companies. About half of our UIT class applied with some amazing ideas and I threw my hat in the ring as well with an idea for a software platform to help address absenteeism in the workplace.

On Thursday, we started a 2-day internal Hackathon competition for our class with a Halloween theme inspired format. Heather Voyles, Sean Demeyere and myself hatched an idea to rate the “scariness” of homes to give insight to parents if it was too scary for small children. We called our project the “Freaky Factor” and we delivered the initial concept but over shot the project scope.

The competition wrapped up on Friday afternoon with all teams presenting and the eventual winners were Seonaid Lee and Carol Louie with their choose your own adventure game, check it out here.

Then we all made our way home to go “trick or treating”….

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Darren MacDonald is an entrepreneur, ergonomist, ski bum, technophile and life long learner. He loves design, usability, @BigSpruceBrew and @UITstartup.