What began with 74,000 registrants ended today with 11 winners of the Imagine Cup U.S. Finals, hosted this year on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington. These three student teams took home top prizes for projects designed to tackle real-world issues including accessibility, clean energy and deforestation.
Team Note-Taker from Arizona State University won the Software Design competition and will represent the U.S. at the Imagine Cup 2011 Worldwide Finals in New York City this summer. The te
am, made up of Michael Astrauskas, David Hayden, Shashank Srinivas and Qian Yan, designed an assistive technology to help vision-impaired students take notes in class. In victory, Hayden remarked, “Technology empowers the individual to make the world accessible according to their own needs. Our work demonstrates this by equipping low-vision students with a portable assistive technology that enables them to take their own notes – a process that is well known to benefit retention.”
In the Game Design competitions, both U.S. winning teams impressed us with their ingenuity. Team Bloom from Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy used XNA to design Spero, a game that focuses on making a difference one step at a time by having players help find alternative energy solutions, keep the environment clean and educate people on how to live healthier lives. And Team Big Impact Bear from the University of Houston created Forest Gun, a mobile game that takes a proactive approach to ending deforestation, aiming to prevent clear-cutting and reverse its effects. Both teams took gaming to a whole new level… gaming for the greater good.
This year’s U.S. People’
s Choice Award was decided by more than 34,000 eager Facebook voters and text messagers. Brigham Young University’s Team Bearpaw was victorious in the Software Design category, receiving the most votes from an adoring public. Their project, Mobile Ultrasound, uses cloud-computing services for the storage and image processing of ultrasound images, input of patient info, and the ability to upload to a server for future processing and retrieval. Team Bloom won the People’s Choice award for Game Design.
The awards ceremony capped a weekend during which 22 U.S. finalist teams competed, made new friends and explored Seattle. Alex Ryu of Team TTHV remarked, “The whole experience has been phenomenal – it is such a student-centric event!” We’d like to thank all participants in this year’s event, as well as our esteemed panel of judges and our inspiring speakers, including game developer Jane McGonigal and Microsoft Principal Researcher Bill Buxton.
This year’s finalist teams now go back to their universities with the humble knowledge that they are doing their part to change the world. We can’t wait to see what they all do next!
To learn more about all the U.S. finalists, visit http://www.facebook.com/MicrosoftTechStudent?sk=app_188514771167996.
