Ask HN: Creating a programming competition for university students

Prezi is currently running a competition mainly for university students which let's them apply control theory to a real-world autoscaling problem.

https://www.hackerrank.com/prezi-scale

I think we did a pretty good job of describing the problem, and we have a prize of $1500. We have received a few pretty clever solutions, but I think a lot more students should be interested in solving a real-world problem for real-world cash.

Are they all doing the bug-bounty program instead :)?

Jokes aside, do you have any tips for how to make such a contest appealing to a wider audience?