Northwestern University is in the early stages of exploring migration of its application development to the cloud. This presentation focuses on a recent software application platform development, NUPredicts, and the Northwestern GeoGame, which were developed and deployed from Amazon Web Services cloud platform. NuPredicts is a prediction gaming platform designed to foster student engagement for the One Book One Northwestern 2016 selection, Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise. NUPredicts has been deployed three times, for a Northwestern Big 10 Football Game, the Nate Silver One Book One Northwestern keynote address, and for the November 8 presidential election. NUPredicts will continue to have various other game instances that will occur throughout the year. A faculty committee guides the NUPredicts content and is composed of six members from the departments of economics, computer science, and the business school. The Northwestern GeoGame is a second game built on the same platform and is designed to spur undergraduate knowledge of geography. This version is a daily geography quiz that is hosted by the university's online newspaper "The Daily Northwestern." Both of these instances reside on the same gaming platform and comprise a responsive-web-design HTML5 game and stateless platform run on AWS in a serverless architecture. The platform leverages AWS API Gateway and Lambda for all the game logic, service composition, and orchestration; the data persistence layer is handled by DynamoDB, a NoSQL database with high availability; and the real-time component, built via the creative use of the AWS Internet-of-Things managed service that broadcasts live updates to all connected users.
https://nupredicts.northwestern.edu
