Innovation the Big Winner in First UC Mobile Student Application Development Competition

Future students at the University of Cincinnati will be the beneficiaries of the creativity and ingenuity of current UC students, thanks to a first-in-the nation type competition with multiple corporate sponsors.

UC Mobile, the university’s on-campus cell phone provider, organized the competition, which was open to teams and their faculty advisors from the College of Applied Science, the College of Business and the College of Engineering. Student teams worked the entire academic year to create workable new applications for smart-phones.

Final presentations were made by six teams in late May, with first-place honors going to an application that will help UC students keep tabs on all their multiple involvements and interests across the university.

The "Bearcat Campus Life Assistant" was developed by Brandon Slaby, a fifth-year student from Lima, Ohio, enrolled in the College of Applied Science’s Information Technology program.

Slaby’s application allows UC Mobile users to keep tabs on events and information across a wide number of categories – in essence, pulling together a personal calendar for campus life from a number of sources all available through one interface and conveniently accessible through the omnipresent cell phone.

That was exactly the kind of innovation contest organizers were hoping they would see when they first proposed this idea about a year ago. "This was the first time a competition of this type, with the amount of backing from partners that we got, has been held anywhere," says UC Vice President and Chief Information Officer Fred Siff, referring to strong corporate support for the competition from Cincinnati Bell, Cisco, Dell, Microsoft and RCM Technologies. "After a year’s worth of effort, what we got was an amazing display of the kinds of innovation and imagination that our students are capable of. These presentations were highly impressive."

Slaby says when the contest was first rolled out in the fall, his project began to take shape by looking at sample applications suggested by the contest organizers, including items such as a calendaring system or a restaurant directory. "I thought those individual applications sounded too small, and I began to wonder what it would take to do something that combined them," Slaby says. "The concept became like if you were looking at going to dinner and a movie: What would it take to combine that kind of information (into a single application)?"

Slaby had some ideas on how to get it done, thanks to experiences he had already had during his college education. He had been a co-op student with Bridge Worldwide, a downtown Cincinnati company that specializes in Web advertising. He had been involved in programming projects for them that were somewhat similar to what he thought might work in developing his application.

Still, there were many challenges during the year-long project.

"There were many hours involved in little, stupid, quirky things," Slaby says. "One thing I had to do that I didn’t have any experience with was creating this little Windows service that runs in the background and automates things. Fortunately, with what I’ve done before, I kind of got used to planning how things will work. Co-op has shown me how things come to fruition, and that made the planning easier."

RCM Technologies is now entering an evaluation phase for each of the applications developed by the student teams, with a goal of putting into development those with the most promise.

Second place in the competition went to the team of Ryan Anderson and Yue Chao. They developed the "Presentation Assessment Tool," which allows attendees of a presentation in a multimedia classroom to respond to lecture material by using their cell phones as a handy feedback input device. A free-standing technology currently is used in UC classrooms for this kind of feedback, but the specialized clickers students use to respond cost about $40 for each student, and the receiver costs about $800 per classroom. Anderson and Chao’s application allows the same process to take place without any specialized equipment, with only cell phones and access to a Web server necessary.

Third place was awarded to the team of Alex Hurd, Alex Petychev and Samir Shamma for their project, "Student Bulletin System." This application would allow UCMobile subscribers to buy and sell goods and services, promote community activities and provide social networking for students via their cell phone.

All of the applications had to be fully functional and demonstratable by the time of the final presentations.

"This competition was a fantastic experience," says Yue Chao, one of the developers of the "Presentation Assessment Tool" entry. "The experience demanded that we teach ourselves things we didn’t already know as we pursued this goal."

Prizes went to each of the winning teams. For his first-place effort, Slaby was rewarded with $1,000, a new Dell laptop computer, a Windows Mobile smart-phone and a free trip to Microsoft headquarters, where he will be visiting and meeting with company personnel in July.

"I felt pretty good about my chances, but when I won, it was definitely a pleasant surprise," Slaby says. "I felt good about it. The prizes are nice, and this is definitely something that will look good on the resume."