LINCOLN — At first, David Keck wasn't sure it was a good idea.
Asking students to enter a national competition to build mobile stock-trading applications was far from the typical assignment.
"I was a little hesitant," said Keck, who teaches in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management. "Should students be competing for prize money in the classroom? But I thought, well, let's give it a try."
Last week, the decision to participate paid off. A team of five students from Keck's "Junior Finance" class won $58,000 to be split among the students and $10,000 for the Raikes school from TradeKing, a national online brokerage firm, for their creation of a mobile application, or app, for online stock browsing and trading.
Members of the winning team, named the Stock Bros, were Neema Bahramzad, Derek Guenther and Clay Upton, all of Lincoln; Alec Johnston of Peoria, Ill.; and Chris Johnson of Parkville, Mo.
The Stock Bros competed against 29 other college teams nationally, including seven teams from their class, and worked from September to December creating the winning app.
Keck said another team from the class also received a $1,500 award because TradeKing wanted to offer its app to clients as well.
The winners were announced during a live video conference of the five finalist teams. The other teams were from Loyola University Maryland, McKendree University, Villanova University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.
Team member Guenther, 21, said there were quite a few sleepless nights, but the competition made learning about finance easier for the technology-minded members of the group.
"There's no doubt the students were more engaged and worked harder because of the competition," Keck said.
Stock Bros' app has three components. The first works with Google Chrome, a Web browser, to research stocks while clients browse the Web. As the browser loads the page, it searches for company names and stock symbols, Keck said. When a client hovers over the stock symbols with their cursor, a link is created to more information — such as graphs of stock trends.
The second component allows customers to click the link to access their TradeKing accounts.
And, finally, the app features an alert for clients' cell phones when there is activity involving a stock of interest to the client.
"We wanted something unobtrusive," said Johnson, the team captain. "Something that would work with what people were already doing."
TradeKing CEO Don Montanaro said the competition had a great outcome for everyone, including his company.
Montanaro said the winning app will be included in the company's new App Gallery, which will allow clients to customize how they browse and trade stocks online.
For Keck, who is also the director of the Raikes School, the competition wasn't about money. It was about finding new ways to engage students.
"It was an interesting experiment in education that we'll be thinking about long after the $58,000 is spent," he said.
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