Food lab wins first ever Create-a-thon

After 13 hours of brainstorming sessions, workshops, power naps and pitches, 10 teams at the first annual Carolina Create-a-thon produced ideas of how to bring students together. 

Daniel Rue, a board member of Carolina Creates, said the Create-a-thon set out to show that everyone has some level of creativity.

“Creativity is like a muscle that you can work out,” he said. “Having this event allows students to practice creativity, get introduced to it and learn other skills like entrepreneurship that can be used in organizations, jobs and in the classroom.” 

Claire Hannapel, Alexandria Huber, Gigi Lytton and Mansi Shah won the competition for their idea of creating a UNC Food Lab. The lab would be a community kitchen in places like the Union that student organizations can reserve for meetings. 

“We signed up not knowing much about it, and not knowing what the outcome would be,” Hannapel said. “We were just bouncing around ideas during brainstorming sessions about different things that could help different students navigate, and we all kept coming back to this idea of food classes and providing people with the ability to cook for themselves.” 

The team wanted to create a space on campus that would form a sense of community.

 “We were thinking that there’s no better way to meet people and be part of a community than with food,” Shah said. 

The team also proposed the Food Lab would be used for cooking courses and in Lifetime Fitness labs so students can learn how to cook. Huber said the lab could also benefit UNC food researchers. 

“There are a lot of people in 1789 Venture Labs that are all working on food related projects, so they could actually have a space to do their work,” she said. 

The team said their idea will correspond with UNC's campus-wide theme of food. 

“The idea behind it is to have more connectivity and collaboration with professors, courses and research symposiums across campus,” Hannapel. “We want to have a larger and lasting impact, and I think this program that we proposed has that.” 

The team agreed that in order to make their idea a reality, it would take collaboration from many student groups.  

“The judges liked our idea and would like to see it enacted, but we would have to do all the legwork in continuing pushing forward” Hannapel said. “That’s a lot more than 13 hours.”

The team found themselves racing against the clock to create their idea and impress the judges.

“Sometimes we had the idea more flushed out than the actual physical way to make it happen,” Shah said. “Only having 13 hours, we didn’t have the time to get other sources of information that we needed." 

Despite the challenges of creating an idea in only 13 hours, Huber said she would recommend students enter into next year’s Create-a-thon. 

“It’s an experience you should have at least once,” she said. “You get to know people very well, and you’re thinking in a way you often don’t think during classes because you’re just going where your ideas take you.” 

Students were buzzing with excitement because they felt they were making a difference at UNC. 

“I thought the atmosphere was fun and fast-paced,” said Eryn Ratcliff, director of ideation. 

“Many participants told me afterward that it did not feel like they had just spent a little over 13 hours in the Student Union.” 

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