Microsoft Academia Accelerator engages both students and faculty and creates a robust environment for them to work with world’s top technology company
Some dreams are realised much before they ought to be realised. Engineering students of top institutes in the country precisely are experiencing that thanks to Microsoft Academia Accelerator, a programme aimed at building a deep and long-term association between the Microsoft and the academic institutions.
Tailored for tier-I technical institutes in the country, it engages both students and faculty and creates a robust environment for them to realise their dream of working with world’s top technology company. Students get to show their creative skills and sell their ideas to their dream destination even while in college due to this new initiative of Microsoft.
The annual hackathon – code.fun.do – conducted in all the partner campuses is a platform for al the avid college coders to learn how to build modern, real-world applications that run on the latest Microsoft platforms, including mobile and cloud platforms.
“We believe code.fun.do’s Finalist’s Forum is one of the best platforms for student app developers to compete at a national level with their peers,” says Anil Bhansali, Managing Director, Microsoft India (R&D) and General Manager, Cloud and Enterprise, MSIDC.
Some of the finest Apps have been developed in these competitions so far where more than 1,300 students have generated 450 plus Apps. In fact, two apps have been published on the App store by the students. One of them is ‘Sentitweet’ that analyses Twitter feeds of a user and categorises them using sentiment analysis. Another is ‘Swipe It’, a game where you swipe in the direction mentioned on the screen to score points as frequency and speed increases.
This year’s Code.fun.do started off with IIT Kanpur on September 26 and the response has been tremendous not only from the Computer Science students but budding engineers from different streams. The competition encourages in building universal apps across platforms using MS services.
Hackathons
Mr. Bhansali reveals that the Hackathons are preceded by fast-paced, hands-on talks and demos that orient students to core concepts they need to be familiar with before they can build apps for smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles and the cloud.
Students then work in teams tasked with conceiving and implementing original apps for these platforms – in a matter of 24 hours – with full support and guidance from Microsoft mentors.
An interesting aspect of the programme is the rare opportunity students and faculty get to work with professionals of Microsoft.
[“Source- thehindu”]