FEECRA is not just a convention — it is a forcing function. You have one booth, one story, and one chance to show experts why your project deserves support.
With CampusSpark, we framed the problem in student language first: discovery is hard, engagement is invisible, and clubs need digital leverage. The physical card and points system made the idea tangible before judges opened the app.
As project leader, my job was to keep the narrative coherent while the team shipped. That meant translating club feedback into specs, protecting scope during the crunch, and making sure Supabase, Vercel, and Cloudflare were demo-ready under stress.
The lesson I keep: innovation engineering is part technical, part theater. Build something real, then explain it simply enough that a jury sees campus impact in under three minutes.