Every year Microsoft invites a select group of students to become on-campus insiders and serve as a communication point for all of the latest Microsoft tools, technologies and innovations. This program has been so successful for both Microsoft and the participating campuses, that we received additional funding to expand our list of participating universities. The ideal student candidate would be:

• Passionate about technology, tech-savvy and thrilled to learn new skills and share those with others
  
• Not afraid to become a community leader on campus
  
• Actively involved on-campus and with student organizations
  
• Enrolled full time as a student and is eligible to work in the United States from September 1, 2015, through June 1, 2016 and beyond; both undergraduate and graduate students are welcome to apply

Not surprisingly, many student partners find that their experience with the position and being able to show they worked for Microsoft helps them land their “dream job” after graduation.  The link with complete information about the position and application is here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/microsoftstudentpartners. Microsoft would like to fill the position in the next 30 days if possible.

Cheers,

Randy

Easy, Fast, Be a Hero: pick all three!

The challenge of most survey information systems courses taught in the College of Business is that the hands-on projects tend to teach Microsoft Office skills rather than give insights into IT careers.  This might be why CIS, MIS and IS departments still struggle to recruit students to the major despite a very robust job market. The Azure in IS Lab Series has been designed teach important IS concepts while at the same time giving students a better understanding of technology careers beyond textbook exercises. Students use professional tools and learn skills that can have immediate scholastic and career benefit. Each of the projects is based on the Microsoft Azure cloud-computing platform, but allows the teacher and student to explore several implementation scenarios including game development, web development and predictive analytics via Azure Machine Learning.

These labs are targeted specifically at college students enrolled in survey Information Systems courses with limited technical skills, but could easily be used in tech clubs, middle/high schools, etc. The projects are:

1. Mobile Game Development: in this project students walk through one or two self-guided tutorials for one of several game types, and then heavily customize the game mechanics, graphics and story to make a unique game. They then publish the game as an Azure website and use social media to drive traffic, get feed back, etc. Students then have the option of taking it further and publishing their game to Windows, iOS and Android device stores.
   
2. Web Development: In this project students use Azure to build and host a WordPress website or blog. Almost 25% of the websites on the Internet use WordPress, and students from all business disciplines can benefit from learning how to create and deploy a WordPress site.  As an additional benefit, the Azure subscription through DreamSpark is free, and the websites (students get ten websites per subscription) do not expire, even after the student leaves the university.
   
3. Machine Learning: In this project students develop a predictive model using one of a variety of datasets (the Titanic passenger manifest is a favorite) using Azure Machine Learning Studio. They can then deploy their model as a web app, and can then create an API to make a Excel Spreadsheet that uses the model to predict outcomes for the data in the spreadsheet.

All of these projects use browser-based tools, so students can use any personal connected device without the need to download or install software. There are lots of helpful videos, supplemental PowerPoint presentations, grading rubrics, and even guidance for how students can reference their completed projects on a resume or enter their projects in a contest.

These resources are available at no-cost, and technical support is available through the website to help faculty get started and to make sure the projects provide an enjoyable and impactful experience for everyone involved.  In a recent pilot at Arizona State University, over 30 students changed their business concentration as a result of doing the Mobile Game project, and many more thought this was one of the most enjoyable assignments so far in their college experience.

Check out the Azure in IS Lab Series today and give us a call, or forward the page link to a colleague. We think this is a great resource and hope you will too.

Cheers,

Randy

In several previous blog posts I have covered how to write an accomplishments-based resume and related job-application documents:

· Writing an Awesome Resume
· The Effective Cover Letter
· Another Resume Perspective

I have also produced a couple video workshops that cover the same topic in a bit more detail:

· Resume Workshop:
· Behavioral Interviewing Video
· Sample Resumes

These materials have been well regarded as examples of how to highlight work-related experiences, but I frequently get questions from students about how they would go about putting a meaningful school project on their resume. This is a great question that deserves a detailed answer.

First, I think I should discuss what I believe a meaningful school project is. By meaningful, I mean a project that has the ability of being assessed by outsiders and where there is proof that the assessment was positive. For example, if you enter your project in a contest outside of a class assignment and it receives an award, then that is one measure of “meaningful”. Another way of determining “meaningful” would be to publish a web site or mobile app, and then be able to report significant usage or downloads via some kind of dashboard analytics. When you have created a project that you can support its success as a quantified accomplishment (see the resume links above), then you have something worth putting on a resume.

For a student, there are two sections you can potentially put your project accomplishments in: the education section, or the career section. While the formatting is similar, there are some differences worth noting.

In the education section, right below where you show what your major is and expected graduation, and potentially the courses completed, you can create a section titled “Other Academic Achievements” where you highlight awards as shown below:

My recommendation for adding technical accomplishments would be to write something like this:

The other way to present your project experience is to consider yourself as an entrepreneur and list your projects as projects you worked on for your business, as this student did with the mobile apps she made. Some were for class credit and others were for personal experience, but as soon as they were published into the store, they were under her publisher name and hence her business:

I know for a fact that companies look at this kind of experience as almost like an internship, so I tend to prefer this approach when you have a lot of measureable results such as page views or downloads, and when some of your projects go beyond what was required.

Some students will use both approaches, putting the things they did purely for school credit in the Education section and the personal learning projects into their Career section, which helps fill out the page, and give a subtle appearance of more experience. Whichever way you decide to go, make sure you quantify your accomplishment with numbers as shown in the examples above.

Cheers,

Randy

Earlier this week Microsoft announced a new line of hardware products specifically-designed for Windows 10.  Reactions from the tech media have been overwhelmingly positive.  A special website has been created just to showcase the devices.  You can check it out here: https://blogs.windows.com/launch/

Cheers,

Randy

Now that Microsoft is offering Windows Azure websites and SQL Database as part of the DreamSpark.com benefit for students, there is an opportunity for universities to reduce the time, effort and cost of hosting websites for web development classes by letting students self-host in DreamSpark.  Visual Studio 2015 makes deploying to an Azure web app simple; in fact you can set up an Azure Web App with just a few clicks as part of website project configuration.  You can also use just about any client software that supports FTP to upload files.  It is really quite simple to do, but not always apparent to students.  Here’s how:

1. First, create your web app in Azure.  This will take just a minute or two. Once the website is deployed, the site should open to the “Essentials” page where you can view your website URL and a few other website properties.

2. On the “Essentials” pane, select “All Settings”, and on the “Settings” blade, scroll down to the “Publishing” section and select “Deployment Credentials”:

3. Create a user ID (you can use the suggested default or create a new one from scratch) and enter a password (twice).  The password must be at least 8 characters long, and contain upper and lower alphabetic characters, and at least one number. Click on the “Save” icon at the top of window.  Check the Notifications list (the bell icon on the top right in the Menu bar) as you won’t see an obvious indicator that the save was successful elsewhere on the screen.

4. Now going back to the Settings section, open the “Properties” blade:

The information in the “FTP/DEPLOYMENT USER” field is your login user ID.  The information in the “FTP HOST NAME” field is the web app location.  In the next step I will show how it would look using the FTP client functionality in Microsoft Expression Web 4:

5. In the FTP client publishing window in Expression Web 4 you fill out four fields: (1) the “Name” field, (2) the “Location” field, (3) the “User Name” field and, (4) the Password you created in Azure. The easiest way to copy them completely is to click on the “Copy” icon in the Azure Properties blade (circled in the image above) and paste them in the corresponding fields in the site publishing window in Expression Web.  Note that the FTP/DEPLOYMENT USER field is first on the Microsoft Azure blade (in the “Location” area, but it is the second field (in the “Credentials” area) in the FTP publishing credentials in Expression:

When you click “Add” you will connected to Azure and see the two folders that were created by default in Azure when you set the site up. If it doesn’t connect the first time, just click “Add” again; sometimes it will connect on the second try if the first try failed and you filled out the FTP client form correctly.

Your website content should be placed inside the wwwroot subfolder inside of the “site” folder.

Cheers,

Randy

Over my career at Microsoft I have coached and mentored a lot of Imagine Cup teams; some of which have gone on to win at the US and World Finals.  I have also seen teams that had great ideas and projects not make it as far in the competition that could have (I did not say deserved on purpose), because they didn’t emphasize the right things in their competition submissions.  Judges are not mind-readers, nor can they be experts in every knowledge domain or technology.  It is up to the team to tell the judges what they need to hear in order to accurately and fairly assess the quality of the project.  Teams that do this really well deserve to win. Those that don’t, don’t.  In this post, I hope to share some best practices for creating winning submissions gleaned from both mentoring teams and being an Imagine Cup judge.

Know Why The Imagine Cup Exists

Many students mistakenly think that companies run technology competitions because they are motivated by philanthropic aspirations.  Unless you are dealing with a government agency this likely isn’t true.  In the case of Microsoft, the Imagine Cup is a marketing program.  It’s underlying message is “look at what cool things students are capable of using our technology”.  It is a soft sell for sure, but the sell is definitely there. The winners will be chosen because their invention/project puts Microsoft’s tools and technologies in the best light.  Finalists are often given opportunities to appear on television, newspapers, blogs and other news outlets, and the scoring rubric/judging criteria and our own marketing department is ultimately looking at your project through that lens. Even if you use a variety of tools and platforms, how you show off Microsoft’s part of your project will largely determine if you end up on the podium or clapping for someone else.

Know the Scoring Rubric

Each Imagine Cup competition has a published scoring rubric that identifies the different dimensions that your project will be evaluated against.  Usually the judging categories are given different weights so teams know how to prioritize their deliverables, but there are some nuances to judging that make strictly relying on those weights perilous. And just because something isn’t mentioned doesn’t mean it can’t be an influence.

Try to address each area of the rubric in each and every deliverable.  Even in game-play instructions you can mentions things like “to see this really interesting part of the game play do this and that…” and that interesting part showcases some part of the judging criteria.  Yes, you will be repeating yourself and that is exactly the point.  As I explain below, the judges rarely see 100% of everything you submit, and depending on their learning style or a lot of other factors, one or more of your deliverables might not be viewable in an optimal way, so it is best if you try to make sure the judges can evaluate every criteria even if some of your deliverables have technical issues or don’t get the full attention of the judges.

Know the Other Requirements

Each Imagine Cup competition has other mandatory requirements that are not mentioned in the scoring rubric that do impact how your project will be judged or whether it will even be judged.  These requirements are binary pass/fail, and if you don’t meet these you will be disqualified. They include things like you must use Microsoft technologies as either platform or infrastructure/back-end service, maximum team size of four, and that the team has to own or have legal rights or a license to use all intellectual property in the project, etc.

Every Deliverable Stands Alone

In most of the Imagine Cup competitions, you will have multiple deliverables such as a Business Plan, Game Description, and Demo Video.  You will usually have to submit a copy of the actual software at some point, ostensibly so the judges can “try out” your software and see how it works.  Because of this, you might be tempted to assume that since you covered a certain topic in the Business Plan, or that your interface is so intuitive, etc. that you don’t have to mention it elsewhere, particularly in the video. This is a big mistake and here is why: different people have different learning styles. What if your judge is not a “reader” and prefers to learn visually? Then your Business Plan, which is likely a Microsoft Word document isn’t going to be nearly as impactful as your video. That is why every deliverable (where it makes sense at least) needs to attempt to address the entire judging rubric.  Another reality is that even if a judge actually does figure out how to install your software and get it to work (doubtful), she/he isn’t going to know how to use it even if your “instructions” are better than average (also doubtful).  Judges are not going to spend 20 or 30 minutes trying to install and learn to use your software.  They might click around a bit just to make sure your demo wasn’t faked, but watching YOU use your software smoothly and effortlessly in a video is going to make the greatest impression of it’s potential.

How Judging Really Works

First, judges will read your business plan just get the gist of what you are building and if you have a clue about what creating a real business would take.   Next we’ll watch your video. At that point the judge makes a decision whether to keep looking or quit.  If the deliverable’s quality and messaging is well below that of other projects, the judge may decide to save time and fill out the scoring rubric based on those two inputs alone. They won’t be rock solid in every category, but since you won’t see the actual scores it won’t matter, as long as score is significantly below the better projects.  If the project has made a good impression, the judge will look at the rest of the documentation and may try to install the software and use it. But if, for example, you made an iPhone app that runs on Azure, and the judge doesn’t have an iPhone, they likely are not going to try to find a phone to test your app. If they do try to use it, they won’t be an expert; they won’t really know how it works, and so their personal hands-on experience will at best be mediocre. The reality is that very seldom is a judge able to use the code you submitted, so if you don’t do a great job showing it in-use in your video, it is quite unlikely the judges will see it in use at all.

Be Business Professional

You don’t have to act excited in your videos and in-person presentations to be exciting.  I have seen audiences burst into spontaneous applause in the middle of an Imagine Cup competition presentation because the project, or at least the point being made was awesome; not because the team was presenting like they were on reality TV or on a game show.  I have even seen a standing ovation at then end of a presentation at the World Finals.  You want to be that team.   Pretend you are presenting in front of a group of potential investors that are not only judging the value of your invention, but also assessing your experience, maturity, and ability to run a company successfully; because you won’t really be pretending.  Imagine Cup judges are judging you as if you were going to be starting a company and asking for funding. Besides the cost of prizes, Microsoft is also hoping to invest marketing, promotion, and employee time to help winners be successful to amplify the impact (remember why the Imagine Cup exists as discussed above).  So be calm, prepared, and articulate in a mature, restrained way.

When it comes to attire, you don’t have to go suit and tie (unless that is your vibe). Team Poli’ Ahu from the University of Hawaii emphasized their unique cultural and geographic situational awareness with Aloha Shirts and leis. Their project helped Hawaiian residents identify and report damage and dangers from natural disasters that are almost a weekly occurrence in Hawaii.  Many teams compete in team “uniforms” whether it be matching school polo shirts, or even matching tee-shirts.  In my opinion consistency in appearance is a plus. You don’t have to formal, but overly casual or sloppy is definitely not a good idea.

Use and Highlight Microsoft Products

This may seem obvious by now, but a lot of students miss this one, especially when their project uses several different platforms and the visible part isn’t Microsoft. For example, if you are making an app that runs on iPhone but are using Windows Azure as the back-end, then your presentation, video, Business Plan, etc. better spend considerable time explaining how Azure is amazing and makes the iPhone (or any other phone) do things it couldn’t otherwise do.  Don’t just list the Microsoft technologies you are using; show how you are using them and what they do for you that other technologies don’t. Even if your project is a Windows/Windows Phone based, make sure we know what advantages our platform offers relative to other platforms that you might have chosen. If you are using a lot of different Microsoft technologies, then don’t gloss over, say, the Visual Studio contribution. Explain how Visual Studio saved you time, and how you used Visual Studio online for versioning, check-in/check-out, sharing the project remotely, etc. . Same with Azure, Server 2012, etc.

Be The Expert

Far and away the best example of “being an expert was David Hayden and Team Notetaker’s “Notetaker” Imagine Cup project.  The project was designed to help partially-sighted students take notes and copy the chalkboard just as easily as fully-sighted students.  David is legally-blind and he developed the project so he could pass his math and computer science courses (he is finishing his PhD at MIT right now so yeah, it worked).  Any time David was talking about his project he was the undisputed expert in the room. There was no question about vision assistive technologies in general, or potential competitors, or the blind audience that any judge could ask that David didn’t know about.  Not only was he well aware of the limitations of competing technology solutions, but he was also very sharp on the economics and potential audience for his device.  His obvious expertise “sold” his project as much as what it could do; particularly in the early stages of the competition when his prototypes were fairly simple (like the camera built on a Skippy Peanut Butter Jar).

You need to be that expert. If you are making a physics-based shooter, you better be an expert on physics-based shooters and know about every popular game out there including levels, company profiles, published articles about them, etc.  You need to know your competitors not only from a game-play perspective, but also from a business perspective as well.  You need to know why your project is different in positive ways from the other technologies like yours, or designed to do similar things. This will make all the difference when you are in front of judges and they start asking questions; some of which may surprise you because the judge is coming from a different set of personal experiences. Even worse is if the judge is an expert and expects you to be but you aren’t. You don’t want to be submitting an Angry Bird clone and have Tobiah Marks as your judge and not be an expert on physics-based shooters, because he is; his game Blast Monkeys was the top free game in the Android marketplace in 2011; and Tobiah could quite likely be a judge this year.

Get Expert Help and Mentoring

While on that path to becoming an expert, a common mistake that some teams make is that they assume that reading a few Internet articles, or having a little experience from a school assignment makes them an expert in a particular problem domain. One time I asked a student team about potential competitors to their project and they confidently stated that there weren’t any; despite the fact there was a huge billboard out at the freeway onramp a block away from their school advertising a competing solution.  On the other hand, I love to hear students say they have been working closely with one or more agencies that would potentially be customers of their solution.  Getting the advice of experienced experts and professionals is invaluable, particularly in the early stages of your project development.  At some later time you might acquire real expertise on your own, but at least in the beginning, partner with mentors and professionals who are experts. You will save a lot of time, and could end up creating a solution that actually could end up getting used.

How to you get expert help?  The first place to look is to ask your professors if they have any contacts they could introduce you to.  If they are local, arrange a meeting at their office, dress sharp and go there with your team ready to take lots of notes.

Alternatively, do an Internet search for local companies or agencies and make an introductory phone call, not an e-mail, and try to arrange a thirty-minute meeting to ask some questions.  Keep that initial meeting short and be respectful.  If you manage the time well, you’ll probably get invited to “call if you have more questions”.  Try to have at least two, even better, three agencies that you are working with so you get a variety of perspectives.

Rehearse Your Presentation (over and over and over)

My favorite example of this is the “Flash Food” Imagine Cup team from Arizona State University a few years back. This team was created as part of an Engineering social entrepreneurship program. Before their first in-person presentation in the Imagine Cup, the team had already received a number of big cash awards from other competitions, and they estimate that they had already given live presentations of their project in front of judges over 75 times before the Imagine Cup finals.  Needless to say their presentation was very polished and smooth, and they had lots of experience answering questions. So even though I have seen projects that were potentially more “exciting” or “innovative”, I have never seen a team that was better at delivering their message, and they won the US Finals very easily because of their preparation and experience in front of judges where money was on the line. 

Practice and preparation will make a huge difference.  One technique that works well is to put together one or more “mock judging panels” with professors from your school and local industry professionals with domain expertise.  Give them the judging rubric and practice giving your 20-minute pitch (or whatever the time is) to them and have them score you. Trust me, you’ll be terrible the first time, but better that happen in practice than in front of the real judges.  Also, one of the most important things you get out of a mock panel are the questions that they ask. Those questions show you where the holes are in your presentation, and where you can either add content, or at least be prepared with solid answers in case you get asked that question again.

Don’t Give Up

Lastly, just because you don’t get as far into the competition as you would have wished doesn’t mean it is over.  If you haven’t won, there is no rule saying that you can’t submit the same project again in the next wave of submissions.  A little known secret is that a lot of teams run out of time in the Fall and push off submittal until the Winter round, thereby making the Fall Round easier to win because the pool of candidate projects is smaller.  If you don’t make in in Fall or Spring, then just regroup, fill the missing role on your team, and get ready to submit again the next competition cycle.

Cheers,

Randy

I recently had a conversation with a student at a large public university about the introductory CIS class she was taking.  This student had attended a mobile app workshop and had a good enough experience that she wanted to explore the CIS major, and so took a leap of faith and signed up for the introductory course.  The course featured mostly software design theory, of which diagramming played a major part.  In fact the teacher even joked that the students probably weren’t enjoying the assignments, and just kept piling on those type of assignments like it was all fun.  Needless to say, my friend quickly lost her enthusiasm for the major and decided to stick with Finance.  What a loss for the department!

After that conversation, I ran into the department’s advisor and shared the short version of my conversation.  I shared with her my vision of what an introductory course should contain, and I’d like to share a few of my ideas and get some of yours.  Keep in mind, I taught a similar course back in the day when I was a college professor and so I am not at all guiltless.  But my 8+ years at Microsoft has opened my eyes to what really gets students excited, and so this list is based not on my academic experience, but my more recent evangelism experience.

1. The first course should be designed from ground up to attract and retain students to the major.  If there are any notions of making this some kind of “filter” class, you should encourage a different point of view.  This class should be all about fun, cool, and very hands-on, both hardware and software.   It should look more like a tech summer school workshop for high school kids rather than a theoretical college lecture course.

2. Students should be “making stuff” from day one.  Lead with “making”, then explain the theory AFTER they make it so the theory is embedded in rich contexts. Make a game.  Make mobile apps. Hack a server.  Program Arduino or Galileo boards and do fun things like making sounds, lighting up lights, responding to gestures, programming Kinect, interpreting speech.  Blow stuff up; make fires. This should be the most fun class you offer and if you do it right you’ll “sell-out” the class in minutes every semester when registration opens.  It should be a survey of every cool thing your department teaches and lots of stuff you don’t teach but that students may encounter in their careers (if you do a good job at least).  If you don’t teach cool stuff, then start here and work your way up.

3. Deemphasize legacy programming concepts such as diagramming. I spoke with a Program Manager at 343 Studios working on Halo 5, and there are NO formal or required data-flow diagrams, NO UML, NO E-R diagrams.  Other tech guys and gals across our team (about 50) that I have reached out to concur: we use boxes and arrows on white boards sometimes to illustrate and discuss high-level concepts, but special notation, different shaped boxes, etc. are from the old IBM flow-charting days and at least at Microsoft, we don’t use them very much, if at all, and I am willing to bet that few students are being asked to demonstrate those skills in interviews. Even if some companies still use it, is teaching those concepts in your introductory course worth the loss of student majors when you can always cover some of it in later courses?

4. Have faculty who make real stuff today teach the course.   This isn’t about fairness and equity; if a professor can’t rock this class then they shouldn’t be teaching it regardless of their academic qualifications, seniority, or even desire.

5. Bring in guest speakers from industry every other week to talk careers (for 15-20 minutes at the end and stay for Q&A after class).  Use your alumni network for speakers.

6. Have faculty from through-out the department “sponsor” (teach) projects in the class so students get to know a lot of faculty.  Rotate participation every semester. Faculty can submit proposals and your core course “professors” can pick. Yes I know, that’s not the way academia traditionally works, but you have a great opportunity to so something really impactful and transformative.

These are just a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing.  And oh by the way, you are more likely to attract and retain a far more diverse group of students using this approach, which is good for your school, and good for the software industry as a whole.

Got any great ideas in addition to these?  Please share!

Cheers,

Randy

A few years back a small group inside of Microsoft Research developed a functional game development platform for the Xbox they called “Kodu”.  It looks like Kodu has grown up a bit and will soon be released as a touch development platform for Xbox One and Windows called “Project Spark”.  While details appear to sketchy, Project Spark looks to be a platform where you can develop a single game concept and then deploy seamlessly to both the Xbox One and Windows 8 stores.  There is some kind of community being developed behind it; we’ll have to see, but the platform beta is scheduled to be released this month.  You can sign up here: https://joinprojectspark.com and you’ll be notified when it goes live.  I’ve used Kodu and several years ago watched a 7-year walk a group of adults through making a pretty legitimate game without the need to purchase graphical assets.  I’m signed up; how about you?

Cheers,

Randy

Can college freshmen build quality Windows Phone apps in their first eight weeks of school?  Even if they aren’t computer science or information systems majors?  The answer is a resounding YES!  From September 23rd through October 4th, Microsoft hosted an app building project at Arizona State University for the incoming class of business majors enrolled in a required IT class.  The students not only learned how to design and implement simple but quality apps, but they also had two weeks of cutting edge lectures from top app designers and programmers about the app economy, app ecosystem, and app marketing and strategy.  The project was part of exciting two week curriculum module developed by Microsoft and piloted at ASU.  The project immersed students immediately into real software development by having them design, build and market real apps.  As of this writing over 500 of the apps built have been certified and are available for download in the Window Phone Store.  Student reaction to the two-week module was very positive and many expressed an interest in changing their intended majors or add Computer Information Systems as a second (double) major.

Project Description

For the project the students used the newly launched “App Studio” at https://apps.windowsstore.com. App Studio is a browser-based development environment that is platform independent, so students could use whatever computer they had, and did not have to install any additional software. Using App Studio, students chose from one of 19 available app templates and replaced the template content with content of their own. Students could add and delete sections and pages from the templates giving them a wide range of customization options. The six data source types are supported by the App Studio tool including collections (of pictures & text), Bing search RSS, YouTube, RSS, Flickr and HTML 5 text. In addition to designing and creating the app theme, content and pages, students had to use an image editing tool extensively to make app screen shots, logos, tiles and background images.

This was a required assignment, and in order to get credit students had to successfully certify their app in the store. Since App Studio creates functionally-compliant projects, the only serious potential problem was from the quality of their content and image compliance to certification guidelines, making certification a fair requirement. For many students, the need to comply with real-world quality requirements was a first-time experience.

Microsoft Technology Evangelists delivered four 75 minute in-class lectures to the class of 2,700 students; each lecture was given seven times and discussed app platforms, marketing and strategy and app development, as well as how to actually develop the phone apps. Time was allowed at the end of each lecture for Q&A about the project

Office hours and lab were held at the Microsoft Tempe Sales Office across the street from campus.

A special web site was created for the project with how-to’s, links to DreamSpark, App Studio and the Phone Developer Portal (https://aka.ms/cis105).

https://www.mis-laboratory.com/ASUWin8/studentApps.html is a partial listing of certified apps created by the ASU students.

Lecture Topics Covered

Sept 23 & 24

• Intro & overview to app development
• Introduction to the Windows Phone and Windows Phone Apps
• Project Demo

Sept 25 & 26

• App Ecosystem
• Distribution
• User Types
• Platforms
• Android
• iOS
• Windows/Windows Phone
• Blackberry
• Types of Apps
• Games
• Informational
• Utilities

Sept 30 & Oct 1

• App Monetization
• App Marketing
• Oct 2 & Oct 3
• App Development
• IDEs (Integrated Development Environments)
• SDKs (Software Development Kits)
• Game and App Frameworks
• Cloud Environments

Oct 2 & Oct 3

• App Development
• IDEs (Integrated Development Environments)
• SDKs (Software Development Kits)
• Game and App Frameworks
• Cloud Environments

Success Factors

• Student club provided 10 TAs
• Browser-based tool that students could use with their own computers regardless of platform or OS version
• Pre-populated templates helped students understand what they needed to change to complete the app assignment
• Survey tool collected reports of completed apps including GUID and store URL for grading purposes; a similar survey collected certification failure reports
• Microsoft Sales office across the street from campus provided lab and classroom space to handle hundreds of students at one time in an environment that reflected very positively on Microsoft as a company
• Tobiah Marks (top Android game in 2011- “Blast Monkeys”) added credibility and academic rigor to lectures on strategy and marketing due to his rich Android and iPhone development experience and successes

Challenges We Faced

• Virtually none of the students had Windows Phones so testing was limited to our pool of loaner devices, emulators and previews
• Bandwidth in the office couldn’t handle peak loads and simultaneous connections despite reconfiguring the guest wireless to handle 250 IP addresses
• Detailed tutorials and explanations on how to use the templates and how the sections and pages related to each other were lacking on the App Studio website at launch, and we had inadequate time (due to the newness of App Studio) to prepare our own documentation prior to kicking off the project which made it more difficult for less tech-savvy students to figure out the tool on their own.
• Many students had new computers that they really didn’t know how to use (particularly the Mac Users), and we (Microsoft) lacked deep knowledge of the Mac OS so our ability to help with some of the “how do I” questions was limited
• Not enough TA’s to handle peak loads of up to 200 students in the office at one time (30+:1)
• A small percentage of students were under-age and had to have a parent, friend or room-mate make a developer account for them to use.

Next Steps: Coming Soon to Your School?

The ASU app project shows that getting students immersed early in software design and development can add high-interest and value to any tech course regardless of the student skill set.  Microsoft technology evangelists are available to help you implement a similar project at your school.  For bigger opportunities we can personally engage on campus for one to four weeks.  For more information please feel free to contact me via the blog e-mail link and I’ll be happy to discuss your vision for this project and get the ball rolling.

Cheers,

Randy