Question: Team Members Full Names:
Answer: Amirton Bezerra Chagas Flávio Almeida Araújo Sobrinho João Paulo dos Santos Oliveira Lucas Araújo Mello Soares

Question: Mentor:
Answer: Professor André Luis Santos – Universidade Federal de Pernambuco

Question: Title of Project:
Answer: ProLearning

Question: Project Overview:
Answer: ProLearning is designed to maximize the experience of distance learning. It’s composed by an immersive virtual reality environment, where students exchange experience and study together. This environment makes easier the interaction between tutor and pupils, so teachers can give proper feedback to students. ProLearning also offers a social network application, stimulating socialization and interaction of students and providing education process’ important aspects unavailable on distance learning environments, as the perception your pairs development and the ability of sharing your knowledge. Finally, ProLearning has the Mobile module, providing a personalized and automatically updated schedule for the student, indicating and alerting on proper time the activities to be done by the student on his distance learning courses. Optionally, the student is able to see the status of his friends in some particular activity, and realize a VoIP call to get some help. Templated SMS messages can also be sent in this module to friends and teachers.

Question: Technology/Software Used:
Answer: • Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 • Microsoft Expression Studio • Adobe Premier Pro 2.0 • .NET Framework 3.5 • Windows Communication Foundation • Web Services • ASP.NET 3.5 • Silverlight • ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit • Orkut and MySpace • OpenSocial – based on Cloud Computing (provided by Google) • Microsoft Virtual Earth • Google Maps API • Twitter API • RSS Feed • OpenXML • TouchLess SDK • Second Life Official Client • Second Life protocols • LSL (Linden Scripting Language) • .NET Compact Framework 3.5 • British Telecom SDK

Question: Inspiration: What inspired your team to enter the Microsoft Imagine Cup and why did you choose the Interoperability Award competition?
Answer: Initially, we found great the social commitment that Microsoft performs, and its initiative on revealing new talents on the TI area through Imagine Cup. It’s a competition that adds immeasurable values to a student’s team, instigating us to study new technologies and especially for getting out of our box, studying and getting concerned about the world most difficult problems. As UFPE students generally are well placed on Imagine Cup, we get very inspired by their example, and wish we can bring a good result to our university too. This motivates us to work overnight, studying and developing a better solution. This way, we get very encouraged to create ideas and products that have the potential to bring great benefits to the world. Our team is participating on 4 categories in the Egypt 2009 Imagine Cup Edition: • Embedded Development • Software Design • Game Development • Interoperability Award We chose to get into the Interoperability category because the solution proposed for the Software Design category had several elements from many different vendors, and together with Microsoft technology, the solution was very powerful, attractive and viable. Other interesting factor is that we are verifying a growing in the heterogeneity on the companies we work with. This way, we believe that solutions must aggregate the best technologies on the market to build really commercially viable products.

Question: Team History: How did your team meet?
Answer: We study Computer Science together at the Centro de Informática – Universidade Federal de Pernambuco since September 2005. Since then, we became friends and have been forming groups for academic works. In 2007, members of our team got the best score on Microsoft’s S2B in Brazil. A very interesting point, primordial for our success is the differences between us. Each member is concerned and have deep knowledge about distinct areas of interest of computation. As a consequence, projects created by our team had already been presented on Brazilian Microsoft Innovation Centers meeting in 2008, and we have already been finalists of other competitions sponsored by other companies, like Mentez (http://www.mentez.com). Actually we are starting a technology business, and Recife’s Microsoft Innovation Center has invited us to use its infrastructure to develop our projects using Microsoft technology.

Question: Team Experience: What experience did your team have with Interoperability Award before competing in the Imagine Cup?
Answer: We have been developing projects using the OpenSocial API for some time. This technology was develop mainly by Google, and adapts perfectly to the concept of cloud computing. Using it, we can develop applications that run inside social networks, as Orkut, MySpace and Hi5. We have our own framework to facilitate the development of OpenSocial applications using ASP.NET, and already used it on commercial projects of our business. We also have developed projects interoperating with both Google Maps API and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth API. It’s generally required on the projects we develop, the use of third-party technology or webservices, so integrating projects to previously unknown APIs or services is not hard for us. Finally, we always try to follow W3C standards while building our web applications, trying to minimize the problems caused by the use of different browsers.

Question: Highlights: What has been the best part of the Imagine Cup competition to date?
Answer: Creating and maturating the ideas behind a new product is always fascinating. While developing our Imagine Cup project, we always get faced with problems that require much imagination and some time to let the ideas take their final form. This process, which involves interviewing specialists, acting directly with possible users, trying and evaluating processes and products is very motivating, and finally brings a great growth to our capabilities to create and innovate.

Question: Inspiration: How did your team come up with your submission? Include which Millennium Development Goal inspired your solution.
Answer: Our team believe that solving the education problem, we create a base for solving several other hard problems our world is facing nowadays. Specifically, we believe that the solution of most of the Millenium Development Goals can be reached by educating people properly around the world. A well educated individual has greatest knowledge of the effects of his actions on the world, and also has consciousness of his rights and duties. Following this belief, we developed a robust and extensible project that solves the main problems of this niche. Helping us is the fact that inside our university has been developed the Amadeus project, a LMS with great elements of usability and focused on the user experience. It’s actually on Brazilian Public Software Portal, where several important open-source Brazilian projects recognized by the government as having high social-economic impact are placed. This way, we got in contact with students, professors and researchers who participated on the creation of Amadeus to get some know-how on the area, and learned how to interoperate our project with Amadeus’ functionalities.

Question: Challenges: What personal or technological challenges did your team face while developing your submission?
Answer: One of the greatest challenges faced on ProLearning’s development happened on the project planning stage. We tried to talk and interview the most influent specialists on education of our state, so, it was very difficult to find some free time on their schedules, as they’re always very busy or traveling. In the end, we managed to get the interviews we wanted, and with the great valuable information provided by us, we started a long planning step on our project, elaborating a product that really could add value to our target audience. The most challenging technical difficulty faced was interoperating with Second Life, since its protocols are very detailed, and any misunderstanding or little programming error can cause a great collateral effect on the application.

Question: Future Plans: What does your team plan on doing after the Worldwide Finals in Cairo, Egypt? Do you plan to use your project to launch a new business?
Answer: Our team intends to study the possibility of launching the project in the market. To achieve this, we will make the necessary adjustments to submit the project to government financial subvention programs, Microsoft SOL (program which our business has signed up) or even finding capital investors. This way, we will transform our Imagine Cup’s project into a commercial product.