The Digital Media Commons is revising GROCS this year, with a goal to broaden its focus and extend its resources, through our new position within the UM Library. We won’t be announcing a CFP first thing in the Fall, but we do hope to have a new program up and running before Spring. For more information email grocs.info@umich.edu

Chance-it Receives Yahoo! Boost Award

Zhang Zhang, Yi Wei Chia, Stan Lin and Jessica Hullman received a first-ever Yahoo! Boost Award to continue the development of their custom mulit-touch table and "Chance-It!", their application that uses the table to explore aspects of the creative process.

The Yahoo! Boost Award will enable the team to move the project toward their goal to make both the table and the application accessible beyond the UM community. Chia’s work this summer will include publishing construction drawings for the table, and improving its software interface so that novice programmers can more easily develop custom applications for it. Hullman will be extending “Chance-It!”, to make it useful for different sources of data and diverse user groups.

The Yahoo! Boost award was created specifically to further the development of a GROCS project. Don McGillen, Yahoo! Senior Manager for Campus Relations, explained, “Most of our awards are for a Best Project. We don’t have any other award quite like this one — but there aren’t many programs like GROCS either!”