Twenty years ago, the film Hackers gave that term a shady, illicit meaning. Now, geeks around the world are taking back the term “hacker,” restoring its original connotations of creativity and intellectual curiosity. Nowhere was that restoration more apparent than at the Microsoft Student Summer Camp 2015, held August 17–20 at Xi’an Jiaotong University (in the Shaanxi province of China), where the theme was “Set sail, geeks!”
Microsoft Summer Camp 2015 marked the start of Microsoft Student Club 2.0.
The camp, which marked the fifteenth anniversary of the Microsoft Student Club in China, brought together 132 students from 34 universities across the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. In addition to embracing the hacker ethos, the camp opened a new chapter in the history of the club—including a new name: Microsoft Student Club 2.0. The designation 2.0 reflects some big changes, many of which were introduced at this year’s Summer Camp.
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Tim Pan, director of University Relations at Microsoft Research Asia, opened the Summer Camp with a keynote that exhorted the campers to adopt the hacker spirit. He then invited two students on stage to talk about their experiences with hacking and creating student projects.
Tim Pan, director of University Relations at Microsoft Research Asia, chats with a camper about his student project.
The students then took part in technical salons, where Microsoft employees introduced them to the latest Microsoft technologies, including Windows 10, Cortana, XiaoIce, Project Oxford, Minecraft, and HoloLens—the very technologies that have fueled some of Microsoft’s own most recent hacking-inspired projects. Xiaowu Hu, an engineer from the Windows team, even taught students how to use the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) to develop apps that work across multiple devices.
Coinciding with Microsoft’s annual hackathon for employees, the Summer Camp hosted its own vibrant hackathon, challenging the students to create a project proposal to address some “pain point” of everyday life. The students rose to the occasion, coming up with projects that took on problems in advertising, art, social gaming, photography, and health, to name just a few of the themes.
For example, the bAd (Best Advertisement) project, created by students from Taiwan University, proposed using facial and speech recognition, along with artificial intelligence, to build an advertising platform that targets its messages to specific viewers. In the final presentations, bAd’s Wu Sheng and Hou Haiqi shared their passion and described the challenges in designing their idea. After working on one concept for nearly an entire day, they discovered it already existed. They had to start over, and in the end they came up with a creative and exciting project.
Students from Hong Kong and Taiwan celebrate the hacker spirit.
The hacker spirit was likewise embodied by a team of students from three Chinese universities, who decided to address what’s become an all-too-common experience these days: people so engaged with their mobile phones that they ignore the friends they’re with in the real world. To address this issue, they designed “Together,” a cooperative game to enhance communication and social interaction, thereby promoting an active, enthusiastic experience with the people in your actual physical location.
A member of the Together project explains the team’s innovative concept for promoting real-world social interactions. The team was composed of students from South China University of Technology, Northeast University, and Sun Yat-Sen University.
Members of Student Club 2.0 won’t just have access to new, flexible, open technology, they’ll also have opportunities to interact with Microsoft employees, who will be engaging more directly with students in advisory and mentoring capacities. In addition, each club chapter will have access to a redesigned website that features robust resources for members. The Product Experience section, for example, will let students beta test new Microsoft products and features and provide feedback to the engineers behind the technology. The relaunched website also includes an Offline Activities section, where individual chapters can plan and share their events and news, and an Online Course section, which provides members access to webinars on a range of topics.
Finally, Student Club 2.0 chapters and their members can now earn special opportunities and prizes. The most active chapters and members will receive awards each year. Moreover, every chapter will be encouraged to develop an annual project to submit to the Imagine Cup or other competitions. At the end of the year, the top 10 Student Club projects will be hand-selected for review and recognition by a team of Microsoft leaders.
Since its inception in 2000, the club has aimed to inspire students to pursue innovative and entrepreneurial futures. The 2.0 incarnation preserves these aims and adds the goal of providing students with a clear understanding of the new, ever-changing tech field, enabling them to enter the workforce informed, experienced, and with a network of likeminded peers and mentors to support them. We look forward to the next 15 years, as today’s 2.0 students apply their hacker spirit to create tomorrow’s transformations.
Students and Microsoft employees salute the end of a very successful Summer Camp 2015.
—Guobin Wu (opens in new tab), Senior Research Program Manager, Microsoft Research
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