The 2025 West Virginia Makes Festival presents an opportunity to cash in on your creativity. Simply enter the festival’s annual Design Challenge for a chance to win money and other prizes.
This year’s Adult Category Grand Prize is $2,500. The second-place finisher will receive $750 and third place will receive $250. The Grand Prize winner in the Youth Category will receive $300, with $200 going to the second-place finisher, and $100 to the third-place finisher.
Presented by the Marshall Advanced Manufacturing Center (MAMC), the Oct. 24 festival – which will run from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Memorial Student Center on the Huntington campus of Marshall University – celebrates creativity, ingenuity and innovation in all forms.
The Design Challenge is free for everyone and open to all ages. Challengers will compete in either the youth category (ages 17 and under) or the adult category (ages 18 and older). To be eligible, sign up at www.mfg.marshall.edu/wvmakes25 then exhibit your creations Friday, Oct. 24, at the event.
A panel of judges will visit challengers’ tables during the festival to evaluate their entries and ask questions. Judging will be based on creativity, originality, presentation as challengers explain their creations.
“There are no set guidelines about what qualifies as a Design Challenge entry,” said Tyler Brandstetter, organizer of the annual MAMC event. “We welcome – and hope to see – a diversity of creations.”
In past festivals, entries have included everything from electronic devices, electric motorcycles, paintings and sculptures, costumes, a mechatronic dinosaur, phone and computer apps, Steampunk metal lamps and robots, a fiber optic switching system, mine-safety devices, web-based games, innovative ice cream scoops, a retractable phone holder, fishing lures, solar-powered lighted basketball hoops, medical devices, rockets – even pet desserts.
Entries don’t have to be physical objects. Original audio and video productions as well as performance art entries are welcome, Brandstetter said.
The 2025 Design Challenge participants must be set up and ready to meet judges and festival attendees Oct. 24 promptly at 9 a.m., when the festival begins. Learn more and sign up for the free event at www.mfg.marshall.edu/wvmakes25.
Sept. 28, 2025
