Just back from Imagine ‘08 – what an awesome event!

The event was opened by Luke who stepped everyone through a number of videos highlighting the Power of students. Luke also discussed Dreamspark which has finally landed Down Under and Imagine Cup ‘09. Who knows? Maybe this year we’ll finally see a UWA team!

David then stepped in with “Gaming your way onto Facebook” – an awesome demo which stepped through the creation of a Popfly shoot-em-up which was then published, with leaderboard, to Facebook.

Next we ran a quick session about the MS Internship process. UWA has 3 interns going this year, the second highest from any university (apart from UQ), beating out universities like UNSW and USyd and decimating Victoria (none!). Great news for anyone at UWA who may have thought that being too far over West was a disadvantage.

I then followed up with a quick overview some online services being offered by Microsoft – Deep Zoom, Photosynth and Live Mesh, if you haven’t checked them out – do so! Don’t forget to sign up for the UWA Live Mesh Comp as well and beat out the other unis (including our blog brothers from Curtin)…

From there we moved to on to the IEEE supported free BBQ for participants where we handed out a boat load of swag and prizes to some happy recipients.

We’re always interested in feedback – so leave us a message (or two) with what you thought.

See you at our next event!

There’s only two days before Imagine 08 so if you haven’t already registered CLICK HERE to register now.

Luke
UWA MSP
http://twitter.com/ekulmi

UWA MSPs would like to announce their Live Mesh Competition.

Simply sign up for Live Mesh through our gateway and go into the draw to win a stack of prizes.

You can even increase your chances by adding your own content to our Mesh.

For more details and to sign up CLICK HERE.

Sign up now at: imagine.wamsp.com.au

We’ll elaborate a little more on the program and plan closer to the date, but for now – head over to imagine.wamsp.com.au and sign up so that you don’t lose your spot!

Don’t forget to tell / bring your friends!

For those who somehow missed the posters plastered around uni…

Awesome news just off the wire – three UWA students, including our very own MSP, Luke, are on their way to Seattle for this year’s batch of Aussie interns!

UWA had a strong representation at this year’s internship interviews in Melbourne, which is great for the uni and for all of those who tried out. A good effort was put in by all, but as they saw in Melbourne, there were a lot of candidates vying for those internship spots – but still, good on everyone for getting so far!

Congratulations Luke, David & Jeff!

Stay tuned throughout the summar as WAMSP will keep you up to date with the guys as we follow them through their internship.

Straight from the grapevine it looks like great things are coming for Semester 2! Apart form the launch of Dreamspark (coming soon!) we are in early stages of preperation for a developer oriented event at UWA.

As usual there’ll be heaps of free giveaways and aawesome prizes to pick up – so make sure to stay tuned for more details!

Got suggestions? Questions? Anything else? Feel free to leave a comment below…

Exams (the Storm) are around the corner, hence the “Quiet” around here. GameCamp ‘08 has been and gone (although planning for next year’s is well underway!) so to pick up the slack a bit I thought I’d post some interesting stats:

Tickets

We allowed for 220 tickets (the hall had 211 spaces) – all of which were sold out the week before the event. During the event we had about 230 participants (thank you to our volunteers for running around counting!) from which we got about 200 feedback forms. Here’s the general breakdown of participation:

As you can see, the majority of attendees were UWA students – although we had a great showing from other schools. Future events will focus on bringing in more students from other universities and attracting a larger crowd of year 11-12 students.

Session Feedback

Overall the feedback for the event was excellent – 99.7% of people indicated that they would like a return event and indicated that the general direction we went in was a good one. As you can see below most of the sessions fared well, although there are a number of observations after the graph:

1. The worst faring session was the 5 minute talk by iiNet who were one of our monetary sponsors.
   Next Time: we will endeavour to ensure that all talks by our sponsors are given by industry people and are tailored to the audience.
2. The Q&A session received excellent feedback although there were quite a few people who did not rate it either due to them not being there at that time or due to them believing it to not be relevant to their area of interest.
   Next Time: we will try to include representatives from the graphics and storyboard side of the industry

Overall Feedback

We were impressed by the level of written feedback that people provided and here’s the general breakdown:

1. Technical problems need to be sorted out before the event (the Xbox 360 was not responding during the demo, although it did wake up towards the end of the event)
2. Code demo needs to be given a bit slower to cater for non-coders
3. Presentations need to be more interactive

Summary

The event was an awesome success, most people enjoyed themselves and walked away wanting more – as did we. We have a whole slew of ideas for next year, and we’ll be asking for your ideas throught the year – for now though, we are always looking for more ideas so either post in the comments or just send us an email at uwa@wamsp.com.au.

Thanks again to all those who attended – we hope to see you, and everyone that missed out, next year!

Wooooh! We just got back from Game Camp ‘08 and despite a number of technical issues that caused some glitches when transferring our XNA demo to our Xbox 360, we had an awesome time!

Clocking in at around 230 participants with an XNA overview & demo, a number of industry and university presenters, and topped up with an industry Q&A panel the event was roaring success. There’s lots of feedback (thanks if one of these is yours!), I’ll let everyone know what the main points were when we finish collating it all.

Thanks to everyone who came along – I hope you enjoyed it all, we certainly enjoyed putting it on and are looking forward to WA Game Camp ‘09!

P.S. Keep on the lookout for source code, slides, photos and more from the event…

Register Now at xna.wamsp.com.au

UWA MSPs are pleased to announce Installfest 08.

The idea behind InstallFest is to help out students and staff get software on their PCs that they may normally find difficult, such as downloading large amounts of data from MSDNAA.

We will have hard media available for people to install from, and Installfest techs available for questions.

Venue: Computer Science Room 1.24
Date: Monday 7th Apri
Time: 1pm – 3pm 

For more information, please post at http://forum.wamsp.com.au

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I am very pleased to announce the MSPs at UWA have teamed up with the UWA IEEE Student Branch to bring bigger and better services and events to UWA for the students.

As many of you know, the IEEE has a arm called the IEEE Computer Society, who also have access to MSDNAA along with Computer Science students.

The UWA IEEE Student arm will be sending out Welcome Packs to their members shortly. Be sure to look out for some extra goodies provided by the UWA Microsoft Student Partners.

Any IEEE Student member can also register on our forums at http://forum.wamsp.com.au/ with any queries they may have!

Luke
MSP (UWA)