A team of four MIS majors won first place at the first ever Information Systems Project and Case Competition hosted by Ball State University in Muncie Indiana.
A team of four students majoring in Information Systems at the College of Business Administration took FIRST PLACE in the PROJECT CATEGORY, FIRST PLACE in the PRESENTATION CATEGORY, and THIRD PLACE OVERALL. Congratulations to the four senior MIS Majors who independently conceived of their project, developed it on their own during the spring semester, and successfully presented and defended it against 11 other teams. They are (see picture below):
Iulian Arsene, team captain and Chief Engineer (right)
Derek Lippert, taking on the role of Chief Product Designer (middle)
Gary Ward and Ben Gump, talking on the role of Business Analysts (left and second from left)
Dr. Bill McHenry, Professor of MIS and coach (second from right)
THE IDEA!
In a nutshell, the team took on the idea of developing a USB device with a small screen that can transfer files wirelessly to a similar (or other Bluetooth-enabled) device without having to go through the intermediary of a computer. The team treated this as a new product development, selected a hardware and software platform, investigated and understood the capabilities of a small chip that would be at the heart of the system, wrote code to implement several classes needed to make the transfers work, documented their developed in a UML diagram, developed a 3-D model and animation to go with the presentation, created a lively and informative poster board that blew all the other teams away, analyzed the market position of their product using a SWOT and Five-forces analysis, priced what it would take for an initial proof of concept batch to allow them to move on to seek further funding, and explained all of this in a 20 minute presentation/Q&A session, including a small demo of bits being transferred from the development environment/chip (“the device” as we fondly called it) to an iPhone. A couple of the other teams wrote mobile phone apps or did some programming, but no one took on anything close to the scope of this project. One of the judges told us privately that he has judged many student presentations at Ball State over the years and this was the best single student presentation he has ever seen! Congratulations again to our most successful team!
