Back in February, I attended two all day Virtual Boot Camps at the Microsoft Office in Ottawa. Both were Interesting presentations with an interesting way to keep the presentation interesting.
The events were a series of presentations, each followed by a challenge that involved what was just presented. The participants were divided into teams so that everyone gets involved, no one person stands out and it added some excitement to the process. As each team finished, the presenter or one of the assistants would verify that the challenge was successful. At that point the team was assigned a finishing position (and associated points) and the results were entered in an Excel spreadsheet. At the end of the event, prizes were awarded based on the awarded points.
One benefit of the challenge is that it will highlight any problems with how the material was presented. It also reinforced the material for the participants. We learn by listening, but we learn more by doing.
After a few months of work, I can now say, that there is an app for that.
The main page is a list of the teams, their total points, their finishing position and the points they earned for the various challenges. Challenges are entered by using a page that has a tile for each team. Initially, they are all green with a team name, but as they are pressed, the tile’s colour turns to red and the finishing position is also displayed on the tile. The page has a delete button to restore the last tile pressed and on the man page is a delete button to totally remove a challenge. When all the buttons are pressed the app goes back to the main page. You do not have to wait for the last team, you can finish the challenge by using the back key. The app contains a leader board and the ability to change the value for the various finishing positions.
The initial event was an all-day event with about eight related presentations. With the app, the information is saved and the phone can be powered off. So an event could go for several days or even months. To make the longer events more palatable, a future version will allow multiple events to be saved and restored. I also want to implement a way to save the event’s information to the cloud so that if the phone that is used on day one cannot make it to a subsequent day, another phone can download the information and continue.
This app was a learning project and I did learn how easy it was to make a multilingual app. This app supports English, French, Polish and German (I got carried away after I did the French) The hard part was finding a native speaker to verify the language.
So if you are interested, you can download the app from http://www.windowsphone.com/en-CA/apps/2e175df8-2028-4f6d-b974-e90215b44f6e
John Marshall… Visio MVP Visio.MVPs.org
john Visio MVP 