Four MIT undergraduates shared a $25k prize as round one winners in Google's Android Developer Challenge, a worldwide open competition for software developers based on Google's Android software stack for mobile applications.Clare Bayley '10, Carter Jernigan '08, Jasper Lin '08, and Christina Wright '08 were awarded the prize for their term project in Course VI class 6.087/6.081: Building Mobile Applications with Android. This experimental class, taught by EECS Prof. Hal Abelson with the aid of IS&T's mobile devices platform project manager Andrew Yu, was unique in its use of professional (volunteer) application developers from the Boston software developer community as mentors. Eric Carlson of ConnectedBits was the mentor for the winning 'Locale' project team. Locale was one of 50 winning projects selected on May 9 from a field of 1800 entries. As round 1 winners, the MIT students are now eligible to compete for higher levels in the Developer Challenge--leading to prizes of up to $275 thousand.
