When most people are 16, the extent of their programming knowledge — if there’s any to be spoken of — is pretty much limited to using conditional loops to print an endless stream of obscenities to the screen. These guys, however, are using their programming know-how to jetset around the world, rock competitions, and take home hardware unavailable to just about anyone else in the world.
Meet Eric Lo, 16, and Christian Hood, 17. Armed with nothing but a few weeks worth of effort, the desire to build something cool, and a Wiimote they hacked to act as the accelerometer in place of the handset they didn’t have, they emerged with Droid Assault for Windows Phone 7. They submitted it to Microsoft’s Rockstar challenge — and they won.
Beyond a free trip to Poland for the Awards Ceremony and a fat check, Microsoft surprised the guys with Windows Phone 7 handsets — the first of their kind, outside of Microsoft and Co.’s development labs — to take home. Turns out, all of the finalists (which, with around 103 teams named, works out to around 350 people) get handsets as well. You hear that ticking? Thats the countdown before these things start popping up on eBay.
[Via Windows Team Blog]