Two BYU-Hawaii School of Computing students — William Davis from Guam and Fabricio Correa Duarte (upper left) from Curitiba, Brazil — recently distinguished themselves by winning the Microsoft ImagineCup software design competition in Hawaii on just one one week's notice, and then advanced to the regional competition in San Jose, California. From there, Duarte went on to the competition's national finals in Redmond, Washington.
Davis, a senior information systems major whose parents both attended BYU-Hawaii, is currently doing his internship with Microsoft in Washington, based on a job fair he attended during the competition. He indicated he didn't have much experience with the C# programming language and Microsoft.net that were used in the challenges.
Duarte, a freshman computer science and information systems major who served a mission in Boston, Massachusetts, before enrolling at BYUH, has been working with computers since he was 13, and started developing financial software for banks software in Brazil while he was still in high school. He explained the initial competition consisted of online rounds with about 700 students from over 170 institutions in the U.S. and Canada, followed by about 500 participating in four regional semifinals, from which six from each made it to the national finals. There is also a world competition, he said.
"The online competition at the beginning of the year was a skills challenge. We had to do skill-based tests to see whether we had good programming skills," Duarte said. He added that even though he and Davis worked individually on this part, they often consulted one another.
BYU-Hawaii's Dr. Tim Stanley, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Information Systems, said both students "did really well in the initial competition," especially because they only had about one week to prepare. "Most of our students are studying generic C++ [programming language], but Microsoft requires more specialization. We had several other students who were ready to graduate and didn't have the time prepare for the competition."
Dr. Stanley added that at the end of the first round, Davis and Duarte "were actually in the top-third, and came in ahead of some of the big-name schools like MIT, Stanford and Harvard." He pointed out, however, that some universities do not focus on specific software.
In the semifinal competition last April in San Jose, Duarte said he and Davis had three hours, with a half-hour taken up in instruction and rules, "to make a chess game. They provided the structure we had to follow. We had to program in either C# or VB — Visual Basic. It was challenging. I had never programmed a game before."
Duarte spent from June 10-17 at the U.S. finals in Microsoft's hometown of Redmond, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. "Microsoft paid all the expenses," he said. "It was a really good experience. There were prizes from Microsoft and other companies. Students got interviewed for internships and also for fulltime positions. That was pretty cool, and I'd like to do an internship with them some day. For example, we got to go to the employee store and buy stuff at discount."
"The finals were interesting, challenging and exciting," Duarte continued. "They divided the 24 of us into teams of four. On my team we had a guy from Oregon, Washington and Canada. This year's challenge was to imagine a world where technology enables better education for all. Together, we had to come up with an idea and make software that fulfilled this requirement."
"We came up with a kind of live-meeting software," he said, explaining his team's creation facilitated group discussion and homework, where each member of a study group could see, interact and contribute to the creation of a live document. We called it Melamine, which is the main component of a white board [as used in classrooms]. We spent the whole week on it. We actually could have taken up to two months, but two of the guys on our team were graduating and we were all busy. We took one day to come up with the idea, and spent the rest of the time programming."
"It was a pretty good project with a web interface. We also developed the whole application for a mobile phone," Duarte said. He noted the winners, who advanced to the world competition, created a social network for multilingual translation.
Duarte said the experience demonstrated to him how different the environment is at BYU-Hawaii. "It gave me good insights that this is really a good place to be." He added he plans to go to graduate school after BYU-Hawaii. "I want to get more education."
"We're really proud of them, and we're going to try to have Fabricio as captain of our team next fall," Dr. Stanley said. "These are the kinds of opportunities that make people see computer science is valuable."
