Stan Aungst met with Paul Zikopoulos and other IBM researchers at the company's research center in Toronto to get ideas for a project to challenge his students. With an upcoming campus luau in mind, Aungst and Jonathan Korteweg, a junior IST major, came up with the idea for Virtual Coconuts, an on-line store accessible over mobile computing devices selling Hawaiian shirts and papier mache coconuts. Students worked with cutting edge technology, in a team environment, to produce a real-world product. The result was an instructor-directed, student-developed customer relationship management system utilizing state-of-the-art mobile and wireless computing.

The Virtual Coconuts model has been refined to provide a similar, but shorter, learning environment for Pennsylvania high school students attending the week-long summer Governor's School for Information Technology.

The PGSIT website can be viewed at: http://ist05.ma.psu.edu/~kxf186/home.html
The Virtual Coconuts website can be viewed at http://www.ma.psu.edu/~jxk404/gs/home.html

In a continuation of the research, Aungst currently is working with Steve Kellogg, Director of the Advanced Information Technology Group in Computer and Information Systems, and Kevin Morooney, Senior Director, at Penn State's Center for Academic Computing, on using cryptography in the development of secure mobile and wireless systems for e-commerce.

More information on the project can be found on IBM's website at:
http://www-3.ibm.com/pvc/tech/case_studies/pdf/Penn_State_store.pdf