U of M Undergraduates Place First in Microsoft Pocket PC Programming Competition

CS&E Department Chair Pen Yew, who was attending the Microsoft Faculty Summit, was excited to witness two U of M students, Julian Selman and Michael Wyman, announced as winners of the first prize of $25,000 in Microsoft's first Pocket PC programming contest last July in Redmond, Washington. More than 100 students entered the competition, which was open to students at colleges and universities involved in the Microsoft Research University Relations Student Consultant Program.

Sean McNee, the U of M's Microsoft representative, informed Michael in January 2001 of the contest. Michael convinced Julian to join him in the contest since they had worked well together in a compiler class project. They decided to choose an application that would show off the capabilities of the Pocket PC: graphics, sound, and processing speed, so they chose to develop a game. Slither, the result of their programming efforts, requires moving a worm around the screen so that it grabs as many apples as possible while avoiding being eaten by snakes. They worked on this project in their spare time and submitted it in April to be judged by a group of U of M computer science faculty. It was judged to be the best entrant from the U of M students. Then it was sent to Microsoft to be judged against the top applications from many other universities in the program.

Independent of this project, Julian Selman accepted a position at Microsoft and started working there in June. Michael had been offered a summer internship at Microsoft on the Pocket PC team in December of 2000, before he had even heard of the competition. Thus, both Julian and Michael were working at Microsoft in July when the winners were announced by Rick Rashid, Senior Vice President of Research.

Michael, who will graduate in May, said that working on the project was a good experience and winning the competition has been useful in job interviews, sparking interest among employers.

-Bobbie Othmer