Make IT UC Mobile
Student Application Development Competition
by Mark Faulkner
Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Cincinnati Bell, NuSoft, Dell, and UC Mobile are sponsoring a programming competition to provide opportunity and incentive for our students to design and develop creative applications for the mobile environment. Students in the College of Applied Science (Information Technology), College of Business (Information Systems), and College of Engineering (Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science) are currently participating in the competition throughout FY08. Competition winners (who we will announce during spring quarter) will receive prizes that could include cash, a Windows Mobile device, and an interview at Cisco or Microsoft or Cincinnati Bell headquarters for employment internships.
Ten student teams that submitted design briefs at the end of fall quarter are competing. Teams range in size from one to three persons, with a total of 23 students participating in the competition. The students submitted mobile concepts that included money transfer, wayfinder, event notification, presentation assessment, e-mail notification, student bulletin, and social networking. Sponsors judged the design briefs on their clarity conveying the concepts and comprehensiveness articulating the technical execution for application development. Overall, the judges and were genuinely excited and impressed regarding the quality of the ideas and the teams' ability to execute.
During winter quarter, each team will begin the development phase of the competition toward producing a prototype by the end of the quarter. To help the students succeed, we have given each team mobile devices, Visual Studio Pro 2005 software, access to a Microsoft .NET development sandbox and technical support from UCit and NuSoft (a Microsoft development partner).
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