The Seedlings - The UK's Microsoft Imagine Cup 2007 Team

The team at Hull University have done a good job in polishing FPL ready for public consumption, and the domain name will shortly redirect to their site once we've sorted out some final admin and hosting issues!

Not long until you can try it! :)

http://channel8.msdn.com/Posts/Imagine-Cup-2007-Software-Design-Team-Great-Britain/

We made channel 8 with our adventures in Korea. It's a bit amateurish, but so are all the best! :)

We're also doing a handover to the new set of Seedlings today, so they'll be keeping you up to date on the project as it goes along!

Mat

When I signed up for the Imagine Cup a few months back, I had no idea what was in store. I’d entered in 2004 and made it all the way to the worldwide finals in Sao Paulo, Brazil, but never expected anything like that to happen again.

Now I’m currently on the plane back, recovering from the jet lag of visiting Seoul, South Korea where I’ve had my second “once in a lifetime” experience. It has been an amazing week, and Microsoft have really outdone themselves on taking more than 350 students hundreds and even thousands of miles so that they can get together, share their various cultures, and really have a chance to show off what they’ve used different technologies to achieve.

I’ll introduce who we are first. We represented the UK and the University of Hull in the Software Design Challenge. Our application has the goal of teaching 7-11 year olds to program, and has been designed to be flexible enough so that we can modify it in the future to increase its capabilities and target audience. My name’s Mat Steeples, and for the past 4 months I’ve spent nearly every waking hour of every day with Jim Alexander and Matt Steels. It’s been a very long and interesting journey getting to the worldwide finals, but it’s an experience that’s well worth doing and that we’d all recommend to anyone.

We entered the UK finals on a bit of a whim really, on the deadline for new entries. A project that Jim and Matt (and there was also a 4th team member at the time called Michelle) were working on fit this year’s theme of “Imagine a world where technology enables a better education for all” so they were encouraged to enter. I was a very last minute addition to the team.

The UK finals are very much a dim and distant blur now, so I’ll talk about what’s happened over the past week. Spending a week 6,000 miles from home in a land where none of our mobile phones worked and access to the internet wasn’t as ubiquitous as you’d expect from the world’s largest software company has really encouraged us to make friends, share stories and basically have a lot of fun with people from over 60 different countries. We didn’t win the competition (we didn’t even make the top 12) but our experience nonetheless has been incredible. We’ve seen a lot of projects out there which have a lot of potential, and are being driven forwards by people so passionate about what they are doing and who really believe that what they are doing can make a difference. The strangest thing is that they’re right! The press coverage and opportunities that the Imagine Cup generates don’t compare to anything else in the IT world presently. My entire team have been offered jobs off the back of the competition and our project is going to continue to be developed and to slowly but surely spread its wings with the help of the University.

We were taken on a very whirlwind tour of Seoul in South Korea this week, which was very intensive for us to take all in one day (as two of us kept falling asleep on the bus between stops) and gave us a significant insight into the culture of the country we were staying in. Later on in the day we visited what could be considered as some form of geek paradise. Buildings with floors and floors of gadgets! GPS units, mobile phones, laptops (with Starcraft installed on them no less! J ) and some buildings even had boxes and boxes of transistors, thermistors, resistors etc!

The presentations of our application were a modest representation of how much time and effort we'd put into making our application work. Being British, the 3 of us seemed to have a natural problem "blowing our own trumpet" to a large group of people. The demonstration gave a good overview, but we simply just didn't have enough time to explain how the application worked to demonstrate how flexible and adaptable it is. That doesn't really matter though, as the end of the competition does not signify the end of our project at all. We're giving it back to the University and mentoring it on a professional level so that the project can grow and continue to be developed.

Seeing the presentations of the top 6 teams was an amazing sight, as they took to the main stage and presented to over 350 people. Oozing personality, charisma and charm, they were very happy to be there, and deserved every minute of fame that the competition is bringing them. In a way we had a very significant advantage over most of the teams, as English is our first language. It really showed a fantastic level of commitment on the part of the competitors who made an attempt to overcome the barrier of language.

Even the journey home has been filled with events and activities. The flight home was fully booked, so we came home on a direct flight which gave us slightly longer in Seoul Airport, but meant that we didn't need to transit through Charles de Gaulle. It was quite interesting (to say the least) trying to sort out our new flights, but we managed in the end and were treated to snacks and beverages in the business class lounge!

In a way I'm quite sad that this will be my last Imagine Cup trip (as a student at least) but on the flip side it's still going to be an annual chance for every other student in the UK. The guys at Microsoft are continually taking feedback and working to make the Imagine Cup a memorable and enjoyable experience.

Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment
- France '08, www.imaginecup.com

Happy coding! :)

Well, it sounded like a catchy title. It's currently 11:15 here local time, and we're explaining our idea to anyone and everyone that will listen.

We've also managed to hand out a number of business cards, which is hopefully why you've started reading this site! We may have asked or encouraged you to translate our application into another language, or you may just be interested in downloading the application itself. We'll just give you a brief overview of what's happening with the project in the short to long term.

Our first set of tasks involve getting the application to a fully working state via ClickOnce. It works on the desktop at the moment but there's a few bugs that we only get via ClickOnce deployment that have been difficult to pin down. While doing this, we're also going to be setting up forums for feedback and suggestions, as well as recruiting volunteers for translating the product.

After that we're going to take our project into additional schools for more feedback from academics and teachers, and to demonstrate it to our target audience of 7-11 year olds.

As we get closer to releasing a new version or more information, we will update this blog. If you would like to ask any questions in the meantime then feel free to leave comments on this blog or contact us on community@myfpl.co.uk

Thanks very much for your interest. It's been an awesome week here! We've really enjoyed ourselves and meeting the rest of the teams from around the world. Now for the long journey home.

The journey to Korea started today. It has involved a lengthy trip on a train down to Heathrow for all of us (although sadly as we're all going from different parts of the country that's 3 independent journeys), so that we're ready for the 5:30am (!!!) start tomorrow morning. I've got a feeling it's going to be a very very long day. We're still polishing off bits of the presentation and the application, and hopefully the flight will give us enough time to get that sorted. Apparently with us flying out by Air France, the majority of the films are going to be in French. Time to brush up on my foreign language skills methinks... or maybe I'll just sleep! :P

We'll try and keep you posted on what we get up to out there and, if they manage to track us down to film us, channel 8 (Microsoft's Student version of Channel 9) will be recording some events and presentations etc so you may see us on there! :)

Until next time

(PS: Just realised that this has been sat in Live Writer for a considerable amount of time, as it's now day 6!)

Well, we made it! After thousands of miles on airplanes, we made it to South Korea. The flight was a very long one, but an executive decision by the team meant that we didn't sleep the night before travelling. This was so that we'd be tired enough to sleep on the plane, and hopefully conquer jetlag. I've got one piece of advice for you if you're considering it... Don't! We're still jetlagged now on Tuesday, and we got here on sunday morning! :P

The competition itself is amazing. We've given two presentations so far, and are currently waiting to see if we've conquered the first round to make the top 12 (out of 60). We've made lots of friends here with people all around the world, tried practicing some of our foreign language skills (myself and Jim were practicing korean on the plane!) and generally spent a lot of time doing anything apart from sleeping!

The event itself is very glamorous and looks very expensive. We've relied heavily on everyone else bringing cameras out to the event, so I'm going to point you in the direction of some flickr pages and blogs now so you can see what we've been up to and what everything looks like:

Robert Hogg - Team Mentor / Boss

Andy Sithers - Our Microsoft Babysitter... I mean ADE ;)

Rob Miles - Lecturer at Uni / Judge

Phil Winstanley - UK Judge for web dev

The application has been very solid through all of our presentations (which is more than can be said for our run throughs beforehand... we had some very last minute bug fixes!) and our presentation has developed at such a rapid pace! It'ss less than an hour now until we find out how well we've done... you're all still asleep in the UK aren't you?!?!

What a busy week!

Mat

Not that there's enough posts out there already on this, but the other day Microsoft updated Visual Studio 2008 (previously "Orcas") to beta 2. From an end user's perspective, this means that you should see some increased reliability and performance, and from a developer's perspective we get lots more shiny features to play with! :)

So, from an FPL point of view it poses a problem. We've got a lot of you out there at the moment testing our product but still running beta 1 of the framework. Unfortunately the 2 aren't compatible, so you'll need to get version 2. This is relatively straightforward to do though:

1. Open the Add/Remove programs window
2. Uninstall the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 (Pre-Release Version)
3. Visit www.matssoftware.co.uk/ClickOnce/publish.htm and re-install MyFPL. It will automatically fetch the new framework and install it for you.

Thanks very much for helping to test this program, and give us a chance at the world finals!

It's continued to be a manic time here in sunny (and mostly dry) Hull. We're still hard at work on our project, implementing features as fast as our little laptops will let us, and fixing bugs nearly as quick as you're throwing them at us! :P

We've got a small build server (called Bob) set up watching our source control repository so whatever you see on ClickOnce is our most up to date build (give or take an hour). Feel free to download it and give it a shot, and submit the bug reports if you manage to get it to crash. We've got some known issues with Vista and not being able to run the generated assembly, and the flowcharts screen is a mess but it's all gradually falling into place.

We're quite hyped up about going to Korea as well, not to mention quite excited by how soon it is and how quickly it's all going to happen (aside from the 13 hour flight via France).

Anyways, there's flowcharts calling out to be implemented now, so I'd best be off!

We've had a very manic week of fixing bugs and implementing features, as can be seen by our latest build (If you're running ClickOnce, it should automagically update). We're working very hard at the moment to get the flowchart sections implemented, so you'll see a lot of changes in our middle tab this week. We're also working on the code sections, so you should see that pad out as the week goes on as well. If you've got any comments or bugs that you'd like us to be aware of, then either add a comment on this blog or send us an email.

Another bit of shameless promotion here: We've got some wallpapers that we'd all like you to download and display to the world on your desktop. We've got 2 different ones available in 3 different sizes at the moment (including widescreen and normal screen ratios) so there should be something for everyone. There's even a cultural joke in one of them! :) They can be downloaded from here.

Yes folks, you head it here first. Our Application not only compiles (after we've slaved away solidly trying to fix the build for the past 2 days) but it even comes bundled with it's own little ClickOnce file. "What does this mean?" I hear you cry. Well basically it means that we've published it on a website, and you can go and download it! It will even update itself automagically when we release a new build!

http://www.matssoftware.co.uk/ClickOnce/publish.htm

"It's one well dodgy build" - Jim (CodeDOM monkey)
"I think it looks really nice" - Matt (Graphics and User Interface)
"Yeah... I'm surprised it builds to be honest" - Mat (Build Manager, ClickOnce maintainer and Tutorial Writer)

Can you Imagine getting an email one day (on the 21st May to be precise) telling you you're off to meet Bill Gates to present your idea? Well, we definitely couldn't... until it arrived! It all sounded so calm, talking about logistics of the event, setting out an itinerary of what was going to happen, etc. It seemed that the person writing the email almost didn't quite understand the excitement that was going to follow!

Needless to say once the initial bout of excitement subsided, the three of us were left quite nervous. We had to put together a presentation for one of the most influential people in the world. It was going to be a tough struggle. Not only that, we had a mere five weeks in which to get everything ready. It was time to get to work.

The first thing we had to do was work out what needed to be done on our application to get it to a demonstratable state. This involved training our fish not to go outside of the tank, adding animations to keep young kids enthralled with the environment and attempting to obliterate as many bugs as possible (For more details on what our application does, go visit our blog).

Then came the complicated bit; we had a two minute speech to prepare that wasn’t allowed to overrun, had to say everything we wanted it to, and had to be sharp, punchy, and most of all memorable. We didn’t want to fly over 4000 miles to stand there speechless (no pun intended)! All in all, it took us about six hours to write our two minute speech. We pored over the wording so many times in order to make it understandable to those outside of the UK, added some facts and statistics for effect and we ensured that what we'd written sounded passionate and genuine. Believing in your idea is important and this comes across not only in the delivery of your speech but also in the content.

Finally the trip was upon us! We all arrived at Terminal 4 of Heathrow airport ready to board the plane...or so we thought. Jim and I managed to check in automatically without any problems. The same couldn't be said however for poor Matt. The spelling was incorrect on his ticket and this caused the automatic check-in machine to give up and refer us to a real person. We bounced around the terminal a bit before eventually boarding our only partially delayed 9.5 hour flight to Seattle.

Landing in Seattle sometime mid afternoon, we blearily made the trek to Redmond. After getting a little lost in the taxi (there's a lot of buildings on Microsoft Campus), we eventually made it to Microsoft Studios. We were treated to various Pizza's and soft drinks (as you'd expect from the world's largest software company) and it wasn't long before introductions were being made and people were excitedly telling us what was going to happen over the next 24 hours. After that, we headed back to the hotel where the team decided to head to the pool before doing some more practice on our presentation and getting a (relatively) early night.

Up bright and early Tuesday morning, we were ready to head back to Microsoft Studios and prepare our stall for the momentous presentation. Finally, the time was upon us. We stood ready by our stall; all three of us on edge, feeling excited yet scared at the same time. The Korean team went before us with hardware used for communicating with people who were both deaf and blind. Then it was our turn. We shook Bill Gates' and Craig Mundie's hands as they walked up to us and they made a joke about there being two of us called Mat(t) on the team. We delivered our pitch perfectly...thereabouts! Jim kicked off with the introduction, handed over to me to do our demo, and then Matt wrapped it all up at the end. There were a couple of minor hiccups with the fish misbehaving here and there but aside from that Bill and Craig looked really impressed. They asked us some relevant and quite technical questions after our presentation and we believe we got them thinking about our idea.

After they walked away, we retired into the room where all the soft drinks were kept and watched everybody else's presentations on the big screen. It slowly started to sink in who we'd just spoken to and the three of us sat there quite proud of what we'd just achieved.

The rest of the day was still very good even with such a tough act to follow. We were treated to a talk from Anders Hejlsberg of C# fame (and Delphi/TurboPascal fame before that) and had the opportunity to ask him technical questions as well as how he got to where he is, what he enjoys doing etc. We also spoke to a few guys from the CLR team and chatted about our system architecture.

All in all, the entire experience was well worth doing. Rumour has it they may be able to get Bill at the next Imagine Cup, so it could be you going out there this time next year! What are you waiting for? http://www.imaginecup.co.uk

Ooo, signed on to the Internet today to find out that there's a new video on the Imagine Cup website! It's got us talking in it this time, and also features our program crashing! :) (Not that it does that anymore of course)

We've got an intense week this week, as we're planning on blitzing everything to do with WPF and getting our user interface so polished that you won't be able to look at it without wearing sunglasses.

We'll keep you posted! :)

I've figured that it's probably time to let you all in on the secret of what our project is all about. The short story is that we're building a tool to help teach school children how to learn the basics of programming Visual Basic code. The long story is called MyFPL:

It's a project we've been working on for the past few months, both as part of the Imagine Cup and as our own pet project. We're putting together a shiny user interface in WPF to try and encourage children between the ages of 7 and 11 to want to learn how to program. Our primary motivation for this is to try and counteract the falling number of applicants to Computer Science related degrees by stimulating an interest in computer programming. By making it interesting to use and rewarding for the user, they are more likely to follow our course of tutorials and leave with an improved understanding of the basic concepts of computer programming.

We're using a lot of shiny technologies in our project, encompassing Microsoft's latest and greatest version of the .net framework (3.5 beta 1) and using the latest build of "Orcas" (Or Visual Studio 2008 as it's now known) and Team Foundation Server to work together as a team. As most of the technologies we're using are either new to the world or new to us, we've had numerous teething problems and learning curves to overcome. However, with the three of us being recent Computer Science graduates of some form or another (MEng, BSc) pending results day on Monday, we're taking these in our stride and absorbing it all as we go along.

Obviously there's a few things that continue to frustrate us with this project, and my pet peeve at the moment is ClickOnce. We want to be able to deploy our application to a wide group of testers, and ensure that they've always got the most up to date build. We've managed to build a ClickOnce deployment script so that it builds it and publishes it to a website, but the application crashes on load. Turns out that the it can't find the tutorial file that it's trying to load. For some bizarre reason the deployment scripts bung our tutorial xml file into a different folder from the executable! How annoying is that? Ah well, it's on my todo list.

We've also been finding the odd bug here and there in Orcas, but as it's only beta 1 it's to be expected. We're trying to report the reproducible ones as we go along, and can't wait for beta 2 to come out as hopefully it's going to be a lot faster and reliable.

What a day. What a way to end the week. Spending our Saturday in Microsoft HQ, Reading, presenting at DDD 5. Managed to go to a few of the talks as well. Very very technical content, and a very well organised day.

We did one of the Grok talks at the lunchtime session and had a half hour slot (which we overran a little bit). The presentation was very good, and very close to what we're hoping to do in South Korea, just obviously with a slightly better demo. Speaking of which, the fish were very naughty in our demo. We'd put the laptop to standby before going on stage (for our traditional British Blue Peter "Here's one we prepared earlier" style demo) and WPF obviously didn't like this. The screen painted, and the attendees could see our warm and fuzzy development environment, but the fish would refuse to budge when I tried dragging one on to the screen.

We had some good questions in the Q&A section after our presentation as well, and some people even carried on asking us questions when they bumped into us randomly throughout the rest of the afternoon. We get some very good feedback and criticism from these, and reckon it's going to make a huge difference to how we present our product, what ideas we choose to highlight etc.

The Team would like to thank the people who organise the event for fitting us in to a lunchtime slot at relatively short notice, and also to everyone who asked questions. If anyone has any questions or comments that they'd to ask or put forwards, then please feel free to post comments on here.

Technorati Tag DDD5

Well, the pitch is done... and what an awesome pitch it was! I'm sure if he thought he could afford it he'd have offered to buy it from us. The delivery from the 3 of us was spot on... just about. The fish were obviously still disorientated from the flight, and decided at one point to all vanish from the screen, and then swim out from behind the other controls on the form. It wasn't as bad as it sounds though, as it got a laugh and proved that we hadn't rigged the whole demo. Was obviously quite excited after doing this pitch, so had to go sit in a different room to watch the rest of the presentations (was televised throughout the majority of the building) as the 3 of us were having difficulties keeping quiet. Joe Wilson and co have put together a video showing the days events which can be found here.

After all of the presentations were finished, we had the opportunity to talk to Anders Hejlsberg about compilers, vNext of .net, and any other burning questions that sprang to mind. We gave him a quick demo of our application as well, and he managed to work out (rather unsurprisingly) what features of .net we'd used where! Guess that means we're using them in the right places ;)

We also had a brief chat with a few guys from the CLR team as well, and all in all the day was full of technical talk and just generally being geeky. Was very awesome!