A real Portal Turret

When people create fun stuff on regular Windows machines and tech new sites take notice, THAT's the kind of stuff MS should acknowledge.
Just have employees at MS (like the people from DPE) look out for creative projects that use Window PCs and give them some kind of official words of encouragement and maybe an offer of help if they have some technical questions.
It doesn't matter that this project doesn't use a Kinect or isn't programmed in Visual Studio, It's still a generic Windows 7 laptop doing something cool.

Matlab is a multiplatform application (Linux, OS X, Windows), and he is using Arduino. But really cool regardless.

That's what I mean. It wasn't using all MS technology but the fact is he was using a Win7 PC to do it is enough.

11 hours ago, Bass wrote

Matlab is a multiplatform application (Linux, OS X, Windows), and he is using Arduino. But really cool regardless.

If Microsoft "helped him" with this project, in what way? This is a class project, if you get too much outside help that might be cheating?

Microsoft could run around and give people who do cool stuff free MSDN subscriptions, maybe to encourage these people to use more Microsoft technology, heh. They sorta do that already, but not in any formal way, I think.

11 hours ago, Bass wrote

Microsoft could run around and give people who do cool stuff free MSDN subscriptions, maybe to encourage these people to use more Microsoft technology, heh. They sorta do that already, but not in any formal way, I think.

Dreamspark (or whatever name they finally gave to whatever was MSDN Academic Alliance). That's about as formal as you'd ever need it to be.