COBA students named semifinalists in Microsoft competition
A team of Harding University students from the Paul R. Carter Collegeof Business Administration competed in the Microsoft Imagine Cup
Competition earlier this year.
The Imagine Cup is a competition for both college and high school
students to use Microsoft technologies to help solve the world’s
toughest problems. The Harding team submitted information about their
project and a video for the two rounds of competition.
The students, all enrolled in the management information systems
capstone course this year, are seniors in their last semester at the
university. They work on projects that include applications to help
small businesses with problems, doing everything from building
websites to designing customer scheduling databases to creating church
involvement databases.
This semester, one group chose to help the College Church of Christ in
Searcy in their benevolence ministry by creating a database that helps
track the needs and people that are part of His House, a donation
center ministry that collects food, clothing and other items for
people in the community.
“The current system did not involve any electronic record keeping of
any kind so the students designed the entire system from interviews
and working with the leaders of His House,” said John Stone, assistant
professor of business and team sponsor. “The project was built with a
Web-based front end so that the system can be expanded to other
ministries in future semesters if necessary.”
The project was submitted to the Imagine Cup Competition where the
team was tasked with developing an application to combat world hunger.
“The distribution of food in countries dealing with famine is quite
difficult,” said Stone. “By adapting the His House project on a larger
scale, the system could help to distribute food and resources equally
to people in need.”
This is the first year a Harding team has entered the competition, and
the group made it to the semifinal round.
“The finals consist of only four teams from the entire nation,” said
Stone. “Considering this was our first attempt in the competition, I
feel we did well and can improve in coming years. We hope to be a part
of this every year in the future.”
The team consisted of seniors Bradley Wolhuter of Bentonville, Ark.;
Chris Ngu of Davie, Fla.; Nik Arezina of Spring, Texas; and Spencer
Broom of Hurst, Texas.