VCU Information Systems students take 1st place
in Imagine Cup finals

From left: John McKeon, James Barrett, and John Sells

VCU wins the Microsoft Imagine Cup U.S. National Competition!

This past weekend, May 21-22, The Department of Information Systems fielded three teams to the U.S. National Microsoft Imagine Cup competition (http://imagine.thespoke.net/us/index.aspx). The competition was held on Friday and Saturday in Redmond, Washington at the Microsoft Campus. The Imagine Cup is a software design competition in which teams from High Schools and Colleges compete in teams of three and four students.

Our winning team, Team ECESIS (John McKeon-Information Systems, James Barrett-Information Systems, John Sells-Computer Science), won out of 41 teams from schools such as Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, UC Berkeley, etc. John, James and John now have the honor of representing not only VCU and the Department but the United States as well, in Yokohama, Japan in late July. This is an astonishing achievement for our school, our department, the educators who have guided these students and, most of all, the students themselves.

Our other two teams finished 2nd and 3rd in their divisions and demonstrated remarkable talent as well. Team IMPACT won 2nd in their division. Team members were Nathan Morse, Aditya Mehta, Jonathan Lumpkin and Patricia Ligon. Team GURU won 3rd in their division. Team members were hiren Patel, Alpesh Patel and Yueh Hai Wong.

Up Close and Personal:

John McKeon is a 22-year-old majoring in information systems with a concentration in application development. After school, he is planning a career in IT consulting and entrepreneurial ventures.

James Barrett ('05) is a 21-year-old senior who will graduate with a bachelor of science degree in information systems with a concentration in application development and a minor in political science. He hopes to attain a master of science degree in information systems and pursue a career in Web applications development.

John Sells is a 22-year-old computer science major. He plans to attend law school in 2006 and pursue a career in high-tech and intellectual property law.

Team Name: ECESIS
University/School: Virginia Commonwealth University
Team Members: John McKeon, James Barrett, and John Sells

Project Abstract

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.