Students

The Cloud in the classroom: Students develop marketable apps

Students in Professor Asim Roy's CIS 430 class are using Force.com -- a development platform offered by salesforce.com -- to create apps in the cloud. Now entering its fourth semester, the partnership between salesforce.com and the Department of Information Systems includes a competition that awards cash prizes to the top projects. For some student teams, the reward is even more than a prize: they are launching new businesses and taking their apps to market.

2011-02-02

It was the second day of class and Sandeep Bhanot from salesforce.com was presenting in Information Systems Professor Asim Roy's cloud computing class. Bhanot walked students through a brief history lesson that started with the main frame era and proceeded through the emergence of client server environments to the latest in cloud computing. Then he issued the challenge. Working in teams, students would spend the semester using Force.com — a development platform offered by salesforce.com — to develop marketable applications in the cloud. Prize money and the possibility of creating a commercially viable product waited at the end of the term. Spring 2011 is the fourth semester that the Department of Information Systems has partnered with salesforce.com to offer students this real-world simulation in class. The story begins in 2009, when Roy was preparing to teach CIS 430. After a few semesters teaching the class — titled "Networks and Distributed Systems" — to seniors at Arizona State University's W. P. Carey School of Business, Roy saw room for improvement. He thought the coursework spent too much time looking "under the hood" of computer networking instead of introducing these business majors to the cutting edge of IT: cloud computing. "We were teaching bits and pieces of network development, like thread and socket programming and XML file processing," he recalls. "But our students are business majors, and I wanted to prepare them to take leadership roles through creative thinking and innovation. I had followed developments in cloud computing and saw salesforce.com's Force.com development platform as a way for students to try their hands creating the next generation of products." In a proposal to department chair Michael Goul, Roy said that cloud computing could potentially become a course in its own right, attracting students from other disciplines. But as a first step, the coming semester could serve as a pilot project. Goul gave Roy's idea the green light, and with the help of salesforce.com, Roy procured documentation and put together a course outline. Two weeks later and just in time for the fall 2009 semester, CIS 430 version 2.0 was up and running. Nick Tran, salesforce.com's director of developer programs, said his group had informally talked about Force.com's potential as a college teaching tool. "But this was the first time we'd heard of an instructor making it the core of a class, and we knew we had to see the results for ourselves. Professor Roy's experiment has proven that for students as well as professionals, hands-on development in the cloud is an exhilarating experience." While Roy's own research focuses on artificial intelligence, he is no stranger to business application development. Back in the 1980s, his Ph.D. dissertation became the basis for a product, IFPS/OPTIMUM, which was widely used by Fortune 500 companies for financial, corporate and production planning. Roy has also taught new product development in the W. P. Carey MBA program and in 2008, attended Dreamforce, salesforce.com's annual conference, with the thought of developing new applications on salesforce.com's CRM platform. Returning home with "The Force.com Cookbook" in his briefcase, he began thinking about how the platform might be used in his undergraduate and graduate courses in the department of information systems. "Whereas most cloud platforms are really remote infrastructures, Force.com is truly about application development," he said. "You get the essential tools for creating applications that can make you very productive, very quickly. Apex code, the Force.com development language, is there if you need it, but our information systems classes don't require a computer scientist's level of programming expertise. With Force.com, low-level programming is not a make-or-break requirement — you can do a whole lot with point-and-click. Force.com also had an advantage in itself being cloud-based. Each student had access to a suite of development tools, with no software installation or maintenance required." The biggest hurdle was that Roy himself was new to the platform. But learning a technology on-the-fly is itself an important career skill, one Roy was happy to model. So he embarked on the learning curve just a few weeks ahead of his students, figuring if it all worked out, he'd be in better shape the following semester. And so on an August afternoon, Professor Roy introduced his class to a technology he had mostly just read about, but was confident would play a big role in his student's careers. "I told them that the cloud would transform the industry over the coming five to 10 years, much as the PC did in displacing the mainframe. It's where the money would be made and the entrepreneurial opportunities would reside, and that their generation would be the first to grow up with it. This kind of sea change comes along only once in a decade or two." Blown away Roy divides his CIS 430 class into teams of four. The assignment: imagine yourself as an entrepreneur. Come up with an idea, design it, and create it in the cloud. The exercise ends in a competition with cash prizes for the winners. From the beginning, Roy was surprised how closely his students guarded their intellectual property. When he asked teams to present to the class, most preferred private meetings, instead. While this secrecy was mostly intramural competitiveness, Roy felt that, in some cases, the confidentiality was justified. "Some of the best ideas really did have commercial potential." After working with Roy throughout that first semester, Tran and his colleagues made a final visit to judge the contests. "We didn't know what to expect," Tran recalled. "But when we walked into the classroom, we were blown away: everything from the business attire to the serious demeanor of the students told us that this was a serious competition." There were 15 quality submissions that semester. Tran and his colleagues awarded first place to an application inspired by European restaurants that allows patrons to order from a menu on a touchscreen. Second place went to an app to help real estate agents improve buyer satisfaction, with downloadable listings that could be sorted and accessed from the field. Third place was given to a student who, inspired by his work in a pet boarding service, created a system that gave customers the status on their dog, bird or cat. Roy was impressed. "In my graduate-level product development courses, we had only enough time for students to conceptualize an application," he said. "And yet with Force.com, these undergrads could actually see how the system would work." His students had thought through the content and structure of the database, as well as workflows. They had created some of pages in Visualforce, Force.com's user interface framework, and mapped out where they would go from there. While a semester wasn't enough time for these apprentice developers to complete an application, some students came close. From class to market ? Since that first semester teaching in the cloud, Roy has refined his classroom methodology. He now first walks students through a standard Force.com application to see how it is put together, and he assumes more of a mentorship role during the incubation phase to help ensure more ideas are development-worthy. Subsequent semesters proved as fruitful as the first. The top team in Fall 2010 included Jim Zbiegien, David Jones, Geoff Bennett and Preston Vaughn (from left in photo). They developed an app they call DRCRM, or Disability Resources Client Relationship Management, that will allow the disability resources advisors on the ASU campuses to manage services for their clients more efficiently. Presently, ASU's Disability Resource Center tracks its clients and schedules services by hand — on databases housed on local drives and even on paper records. DRCRM will create a record on the Force.com platform for approved clients, allowing advisors on any of the university's four campuses to check eligibility and schedule services. Outside consultants who provide some of the services could be allowed access to relevant parts of the scheduling calendar to determine when their services are needed, and where. The interpretive services feature of the DRCRM won the team first place in the salesforce.com competition. They plan to pilot test it on all four campuses in the near future with a limited number of clients, and plan to build apps for the other four service categories. Since there is currently no product like it, DRCRM.com has the potential to go to market and possibly make some money for the students. Meantime, a student project from spring 2010 has already moved to market. Brenton Blaylock (right) and Jeffrey Webb (left) created www.dateu.us, a dating website for students that creates a community of users within a college or university. DateU greeted ASU students when they returned to campus last fall, and will be available at about 3000 more universities across the country this winter. According to the site, DateU helps members suggest to other students fun date ideas such as events and great local spots. "By making connections and supporting local businesses DateU wants to help students make those important life connections," the site declares. Professor Roy says that students are excited by the possibility that they could actually end up with a business at the close of the semester. "The cloud gives all kinds of people the chance to not only imagine new kinds of applications, but to create and sell them — without an enormous expenditure in programmers, computers and software," Roy said. "That's a lesson well worth learning, and we hope to make Force.com available to other department students: both undergrads and graduate students, alike." The larger lesson learned in the class — indeed, one of the objectives of the Computer Information Systems degree — is in the business process improvement that can be achieved through IT. Salesforce competition winners: Fall 2009

• 1st place: Menu ordering system — Charles West, Kyle Burbank, Gordon Arunga, April Bennett
• 2nd place: Real estate — Ethan Owen, Samson Obraha, Travis Spencer, Jeffrey Trovillion
• 3rd place: Pet boarding system — Nathan Carnell, Laura Edwards, James McQeen, Michael Sickles

Spring 2010

• 1st place: Dispatch now — Joshua S. Lemman, Sindhu Janakiram, Mitchell Brown, Andrew Manginelli
• 2nd Place: Cart tracking — Robert McKay, Jaime Esquivel
• 3rd Place: SkyTunes — David Roman, Ian Alexander, Zack Huber, Tiberiu Oprisiu
• Honorable mention: DateU — Brenton Blaylock, Jeffrey Webb, Steven Howard, Shane Ranney

Fall 2010

• 1st Prize: DR.CRM — David Jones, James Zbiegien, Geoffrey Bennett, Preston Vaughn
• 2nd Prize: School Tool — Skylar Versage, Chelsea Wuest, Oday Shahin, Lauren Selby-Griffin
• 3rd Prize: Pet Buddy — Peter Anderson, Kevin Christensen, Mike Delgado, Craig Cox
• Honorable mention: HealtheCloud — Jason Kososki, David DeWitt, Andrew Rysdam, Tom DeMichele
• Honorable mention: E-Backpack — Salem Alomar, Danny Galvin, Brandon Burm, Noel Martinez

— Photo credit Flickr, Creative Commons, gillyberlin  

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