“The Ellen Show” hosted a giveaway via its Twitter page on Tuesday in front of Connelly Center, challenging participants to compete in a series of contests to win prizes, which included tickets to game four of the World Series in Philadelphia.

“The Ellen Show” communicated instructions for the contest to the followers of its Twitter page during Tuesday afternoon, hinting to Philadelphia-area residents to travel to Villanova for a prize giveaway.

Hundreds of students and area residents gathered at the Oreo by 6 p.m. around a stage set up by the producers of “The Ellen Show” to facilitate the contest.

DeGeneres, who has over 3.6 million followers on Twitter, is hosting these contests to give back to her followers, 70 percent of whom are university students.

A team of her producers has been traveling around the country to give back to these students who follow her page by hosting giveaways and broadcasting them live on her show.

Past contests have occurred at other universities including UCSD, Tulane University, University of Oregon, Carnegie Mellon and Boston University. Villanova had the second largest turnout, trailing behind the contest at UCSD last week, which had over 1,500 people present, according to the segment’s producers.

The segment aired yesterday at 3 p.m. on NBC nationwide as a part of “The Ellen Show.”

“We wanted to do something in the Philadelphia area because of the prize and when we thought of Philly, Villanova was the first university to come to mind because it is such a gorgeous campus,” said Aaron Pinkston, a field producer of the show. “The show’s executive producer was raised in the Philadelphia area and thought it would be a good place to host a giveaway.”

The first 12 students to arrive at the taping wearing only a bathing suit and a fake mustache were eligible to compete, as directed by a tweet around 7 p.m. The contest continued with a rap contest. The 12 participants were instructed to compose a 30 second-long rap indicating why they deserved to win the tickets to the World Series game; they had 15 minutes to do so.

The winner of the contest was Colleen Lennon, a 2001 Villanova graduate who lives in the area. Lennon, a regular viewer of the show, plans to take her boyfriend to the World Series game.

She heard about the contest on NBC 10 News Tuesday morning and began to follow “The Ellen Show’s” tweets to find out the location.

Runners up were John Albert, class of 2012 and Sarah Beck, class of 2010. Both Albert and Beck received $500 American Express gift cards.

The nine remaining contestants each received a BlackBerry, an iPod Shuffle, a Sony reader, a camcorder and a GPS system.