Oregon State students JB van Hecke and Brian Holmes sat at their computers, working back and forth on the problems on the screens in front of them and the pizza in their hands.
“I know I’ll be up all night playing with this,” said van Hecke, a BIS major. “I’ll be cranking the coffee and Mountain Dew I guess.”
The pair was part of a group of 17 Oregon State students to participate in a Windows 8 Code-a-thon Friday in Bexell Hall, hosted by the OSU Students of Information Management (SIM) Club.
Students received instruction from a pair of Windows developers in the new Windows 8 app environment and the staple of any good code-a-thon, a free lunch.
The day grew out of a request OSU Instructor and Weatherford Faculty in Residence Michael Curry received from a group of students in his coding class fall term who were interested in turning those skills into a business.
“[They] expressed a desire to be entrepreneurs, so I agreed to help them out,” Curry said. “The goal was the build a business around these apps.”
Curry contacted Microsoft, which provided equipment, instructors and even an xBox 360 to hand out to the team with the best app at the end of the day.
Microsoft developer evangelists Bret Stateham and Jeremy Foster, a former high school teacher himself, gave students a quick overview of Windows 8 app development before leaving the afternoon open for groups to work on their own projects.
Foster said the code-a-thons help get new apps into the Windows store immediately but also introduce new talent to software development and the Windows platform. In addition to Corvallis, Foster was visiting college campuses in Eugene, Bothell, Wash., and Boise, Idaho.
He said college students often have the enthusiasm and most importantly time to get into the new concepts quickly.
“It’s something where college students tend to have the time,” Foster said. “They have heavy course loads but maybe some time in the evening.”
Which was exactly when van Hecke and Holmes were planning to dive into the Windows 8 platform more.
“If I get a game done today that’ll be good, but it’s a great tool,” van Hecke said at the lunch break.
Overall seven new apps were added to the Windows 8 store. Van Hecke and Holmes ended up completing a traffic jam app during the session, winning the xBox. Runners up were Darlene Veenhuizen and Trevor Husseman, who created an apple catching game.
Curry said those apps are tangible benefits students can show as they compete for jobs and internships.
“We’re trying to make opportunities,” Curry said. “It’s not just the classes that get them the job, but the projects they can work on outside that get them the job.”
Microsoft India is conducting an app coding event for theWindows 8 OS in Bangalore this month. The Window 8 AppFestwill start on the 21st of September; it is slated to run for 18hours at a stretch. Microsoft’s idea is to get more coders into one code-a-thon than ever before.