It might have been called the Splash Awards, but the Most Popular App to emerge from the event was one that helps keep users dry, amongst its other capabilities.

The Motorist Companion not only helps motorists if they experience a breakdown or an accident. The iPhone app also has a “rainfall avoidance” feature linked to data from the National Environment Agency’s weather service that warns bikers, especially, of rainfall between one and five kilometres away. It suggests alternate routes and sends them warnings to give them sufficient time to get their raingear on or change their routes.

Mr A. Jeckanath from Nanyang Polytechnic created Motorist Companion because he is a biker himself, who often got to the office wet when it rained while he was working at IBM during his industrial attachment. The app notched up an astounding 901 e-votes, after an Internet appeal garnered support from the biking community.

Motorist Companion was just one of 78 submissions received from high schools and institutions of higher learning (IHLs) for the competition organised by the Singapore Computer Society Student Chapter, with the support of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA). These were whittled down to three finalists from the high schools, and six from the IHLs category. The nine finalists met at the SMU Administration Building for one last hurdle on 20 September – a five-minute presentation to the judges.

“I’m encouraged by the quality of the submissions by the students, and the amount of thinking that went into resolving the problems faced by the man in the street,” said Mr Lo Yoong Khong, Director, Data Management and Analytics Division, IDA, who was on the judging panel. “I look forward to the students developing the apps from where they are now to becoming solutions that will be publicly available.”

The winner for the high school category was Team Yam comprising Jonathan Soong, Jared Sim and Ryan Chong from St Joseph’s Institution, who conceptualised Kindred Knowledge Konnnector, a social-media-for-learning app which utilised information from data.gov.sg . “It’s not like Facebook,” said Jonathan. “In Facebook, people are advertising themselves. In our project, the intention is to learn and share.”

Initially, the team was going to work on a park connector app, but later decided to go with an empowerment app because “we can relate to it”. They then asked a teacher to refine their idea and spent all of their June holidays working on it.

The winning IHL app was Loov by a Temasek Polytechnic team, which is aimed at promoting youth volunteerism by matching users with volunteer opportunities based on preferences such as vicinity and by showing the profiles of fellow volunteers at each site.

“When you read sites like STOMP, everybody is always complaining. We wanted a website where people can post good things. But why stop there? Let’s get people to do good things,” said Eddie Chew. “We hope that people don’t just develop an app but do it to spread a message and ideal.“

Though the idea came easily, the coding was tricky as the three team members were business intelligence and analytics students with no programming knowledge or experience. “The actual programming took about one month – we mostly Googled it,” said Koh Chin.

For them, the project will not stop with this win. The team is working on a partnership with North East Community Development Council to take it further. “We’ve done community projects with them before, so why not reach out to them and see if they will support the idea?” said Darren Ng. “They said they saw potential in the app. We’re trying to get this to be our major project. We hope to get an ACE (Action Community for Entrepreneurship) start-up grant from SPRING Singapore and start a company with this.”

“We’ll expand it to include e-commerce for social enterprise projects, because the reach for their products is very niche,” Koh added.

The Splash Awards 2013 was presented by guest of honour Mr Tan Eng Pheng, Senior Director of Industry Cluster Group, IDA. The Awards is one of the activities under the Apps4SG Competition which closes on 1 October this year. Speaking at the event, Mr Tan highlighted that competitions like this expose students to application development and the value and potential of government data to solve real-life challenges.

“The Government does not have all the answers or solutions, and we need the help of the community – the wisdom of the crowd, to co-create with us,” he said. “Our youths, especially, are showing that they too want to contribute to making our world a better place. By sharing data, the Government hopes to co-create with the public, to develop innovative and useful apps to improve our lives.”