Co-lab Recognizes DevilPrint, Other Student Projects
Winning teams divide $5,000 prize
A student-designed application that makes ePrint available from iPhone and iPad won top honors in the Duke Innovation Co-Lab's inaugural challenge.
The DevilPrint application, developed by Davis Gossage, Emmanuel Shiferaw, Robert Ansel and Jason Oettinger, won $3,000 in the competition, which included submissions from 10 student teams.
The students first started working on the application last fall but struggled with bugs and security issues. With the help of the co-lab, the team was able to move the application to more powerful hardware and rework the code to make it faster, more secure and more reliable.
The application was submitted to the App Store and is expected to be available later this month.
The DevilPrint project exemplified how the co-lab -- a "creativity incubator" organized by Duke's Office of Information Technology (OIT) and Center for Instructional Technology -- can help students use technology to improve life at Duke, said Michael Faber, IT innovation manager for the co-lab.
"Students identified a need in the community and took ownership to solve it through technology, with the co-lab's assistance in setting up IT infrastructure and expert consultation," said Tracy Futhey, the university's chief information officer and vice president for information technology, who helped to judge the student submissions. "We look forward to seeing what other projects and ideas students bring to the table."
The co-lab will sponsor a series of challenges, including a summer challenge focusing on mobile application development, Faber said. Additional challenges will focus on other areas of innovation, encouraging students to identify problems and define solutions, to make effective use of video and multimedia, and to help create requirements for new and emerging services. Read more about the co-lab at colab.duke.edu.
The Innovation Co-Lab is sponsored by the offices of the President, the Provost and the Executive Vice President and Duke's Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative.
In addition to DevilPrint, three other student projects won recognition from the co-lab:
- Second place ($1,000): Chronline, a custom online news platform for Duke's newspaper, The Chronicle, which receives more than 300,000 page views per month.
- Honorable mentions ($500 each): Fix My Campus, an online service that connects student suggestions with groups that can make them happen, using a Duke Groups Facebook page and TalkBin account; and HackDuke, a tool that collects and aggregates data from several Duke systems including ACES.
"The co-lab and events like the hackathon give students an avenue to make things they're not usually asked to make in the classroom. Learning the theory of computer science is nice, but it's good to build something real that people actually use," Faber said. "It's the kind of real-world preparation students need for the future, and the entire Duke community can benefit."