# Changemakers World Cup (CWC) ## Project Brief The Changemakers World Cup (CWC) is a nationwide platform built for 1M1B that gives students across India a structured way to turn a problem they've noticed in their own daily lives into a real, well-defined project. Students identify an issue, refine and elaborate on it, and submit it through the platform for evaluation; the strongest submissions are shortlisted, and the top 50 students nationally earn a trip to the 1M1B Summit at the United Nations in Geneva, whether or not they go on to present there. I led the technical build of the platform with a two-person team, owning the project from initial concept through to deployment — including the full database architecture, which uses caching to keep more than 8,000 student records running smoothly. The entire product was built from scratch in about two to three weeks. ## Problem Statement Running a national competition like this by hand doesn't scale. Thousands of students across the country each need a way to submit and refine their own project idea, and organizers need a reliable way to track submissions, evaluate them fairly and consistently, and identify the strongest entries — all without the process collapsing under the sheer number of participants. Before a platform like this exists, that kind of program typically depends on scattered submissions — emails, forms, spreadsheets — with no consistent structure, making it hard for evaluators to compare entries fairly or keep track of where each student stands. And because only a small number of students can ultimately be shortlisted for the Geneva trip, the evaluation process itself needs to be transparent, auditable, and fast enough to keep up with thousands of submissions. ## Solution Architecture The platform is built around two connected experiences: one for students, and one for the people running and evaluating the competition. Students identify a real problem from their own daily lives, then use the platform to elaborate on it and submit it as a defined project idea. On the organizing side, an admin website and a separate evaluator portal manage the entire lifecycle of the competition. Admins create the tasks students need to complete; once students finish and submit their work, the evaluator portal activates so reviewers can go through each submission, assess it, and assign marks. That scoring is what ultimately determines which students get shortlisted, and which of those make it into the top 50 selected to travel to the UN Summit in Geneva. ## Technical Execution - Built the entire product as a SaaS platform from scratch, using a modern web frontend, a Python-based backend, and a flexible database suited to handling large volumes of student and submission data - Led the project with a two-person team, owning the work from initial concept and architecture through to production deployment - Designed and managed the full database flow, adding a caching layer to keep the system fast and responsive while comfortably handling more than 8,000 records - Built the admin website for task creation and program management, alongside a dedicated evaluator portal that activates once student submissions come in - Structured the evaluation flow so reviewers can go through each submission, score it, and have those marks feed directly into shortlisting decisions - Delivered the whole platform, from first architecture decision to a working product handling real submissions, in roughly two to three weeks ## Results & Impact - Delivered a complete SaaS platform in roughly **2 to 3 weeks** - The system currently holds **8,000+ records**, managed smoothly through a caching layer - Supports the national shortlisting process that selects **50 students** to travel to the 1M1B Summit at the United Nations in Geneva - Gives evaluators a structured, dedicated portal to review and mark submissions consistently, rather than relying on ad hoc, manual review By giving both students and evaluators a single structured system, the platform turned a process that would otherwise be scattered across forms and spreadsheets into one consistent pipeline — from a student noticing a problem in their own life, to a scored submission, to a shortlist that sends real students to present on a global stage. ## Key Learnings - Turning a loosely-run national program into a structured platform, in a short two-to-three-week build, meant prioritizing the core submission-and-evaluation loop first and layering in supporting features like caching once real usage volumes became clear - Separating the admin and evaluator experiences into distinct portals, activated at the right point in the workflow, kept each group focused on exactly what they needed to do at that stage, rather than navigating one crowded interface - Designing the database and caching layer with a large, growing record count in mind early on made it possible to keep performance smooth as registrations climbed past 8,000, rather than needing a rebuild later - Owning a project end-to-end alongside a small, focused team — from concept to deployment — made it possible to move fast without losing sight of what the evaluators and students on the other end actually needed