Mendix University Program blows away MBA students at Curry College
One of the first universities to join the Mendix University Program in the US is Curry College. Since this is a milestone in the worldwide expansion of our program, we would like you to know how students reacted to working with Mendix software. So for a change – no corporate blog post about the University Program, this time we gave a student of Curry College, Marc Lehane, the opportunity to blog about his experiences with Mendix. Enjoy his Post!
The MBA cohort from Curry College (Milton, MA) was introduced to Mendix during our Management of Information and Technology course. During this class our cohort had been broken up into teams combining 4-5 varying backgrounds. After a brief introduction to the Mendix model driven application Professor Akram Ahmed challenged our groups to develop a business model and create a Mendix solution to support it.
from L to R: Han Pieter Duyverman (Mendix), Professor Ahmed Akram, Joe Mearn, Marc Lehane, Pat Casey, Jon Bulman, Vincent de la Mar (Mendix)
Our group, the Step Dads consisted of Marc Lehane (Curry College- Business Management), Joseph Mearn (Hamilton College -Economics), Jon Bulman (Westfield State College -Business Management), and Patrick Casey (Colby-Sawyer College-Business Administration). Most of this team had very little experience in database creation or any sort of IT implementation. Through the basic logic we learned during our program and software operational overview we had one day in class, we were able to design and implement a basic operational customer management system.
Together we proposed and offshore gaming facility who hosted our customers pro football betting action. In this imaginary business we would ask that our customer supplied up front a payment of $5000.00 to create an account. Through the use of the “Micro flow” feature we were able to create logic that most companies would need an experience programmer to create. Based the weekly game results, the Mendix program would determine the winner of every betting option. From there the customer’s betting table would update and determine the transfer value for the customer’s account. At the customer screen, the built in microflow would look to the betting table and summarize the individual’s activity (total transfer amount) and reflect it on the customer.
Though this is a basic business model, we were able to develop it in under two weeks and under 16 working hours without any formal training. The Mendix website helped us teach ourselves through use of their forum and tutorials. We feel as if we were given more time we would have been able to develop a program at par with one that companies would have to invest large amount of money into and spend months and months to implement.
