Virginia Commonwealth University takes the title!
Sorry this took so long to post (we needed a nap after all the excitement):
AND THE WINNER OF THE US NATIONAL FINALS for the Imagine Cup Software Design Invitational
IS
Team ECESIS from Virginia Commonwealth University!
Congrats to James Barrett, John McKeon, and John Sells!
See the press release here.
ECESIS is a Tablet PC - targeted .NET application that helps young kids
learn how to write, and also provides some great tools for their
teachers and parents.
James, John, and John next have a couple months of working on their app
before taking it to the Imagine Cup World Finals in Yokohama, Japan at
the end of July. There they'll represent the US and compete against
students from dozens of other countries for big cash prizes and some
massive bragging rights.
Here's their project abstract (
get it and their bios here, in Word):
ECESIS is an
application that runs in the Tablet PC environment and that can be used in
early-childhood education classrooms to facilitate writing instruction. Using
the application, students will complete a series of lessons that have been
created with help from education faculty members from Virginia Commonwealth
University and the University of South Alabama. These lessons will be stored on
the application server and distributed to client applications by way of Web
services. Data collected on the client machine will be stored in the
Microsoft® Data Engine (MSDE) when the Tablet PC is not connected to
the network and transported to a centralized server running Microsoft SQL
Server™ 2000 and using Web services when connectivity has been
re-established.
The ECESIS
system will provide objective feedback and scoring of student progress, and
includes a Web reporting interface using SQL Server Reporting Services that will
be accessible to parents, teachers and school administrators. The ECISIS team
has modularized the Web reporting interface and the writing instruction
application to facilitate the development of additional instructional modules
that will provide feedback through the common Web reporting
interface.
