Tonight Andy Bulka (our software architect) and I went to the “ICT Panorama” event at the University of Melbourne Computer Science and Software Engineering Department.
Each year, 4th year students in the department are divided into teams who work on innovative projects for “real world” clients. Austhink Software was assigned a team, code-named “Got Code.” Over the past 6 months or so the team has been working on a “Web 2.0″ version of Rationale. This consisted of a simple Flash version of the product (“Rationale Lite”) and an associated Flickr-type website for sharing Rationale maps, called Bickr. A nice feature is that in Bickr you can edit maps online using Bickr (imagine if, in Flickr, you could edit an image using a stripped-down Photoshop).
Other projects included a 3D Tetris, a neural-networks based system for predicting foreign exchange rates, and a system for playing a kind of ping-pong (using a real table) with a remote opponent.
At the ICT Panorama event, all the teams display their projects. They are judged not only on the quality of their work but also on how professionally they present it. Three judges observe all projects, without giving away to the teams that they are judges.
A prize is awarded to the best project. Got Code won… Congratulations to the team, but also to Andy who managed them pretty closely.
We’ll be making Rationale Lite and/or Bickr available just as soon as we feasibly can.
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