How do you get to Australia? Start by building a great team

The World Wide Imagine Cup Finals will be in Australia July 2012. If you’d like to attend, step 1 is to assemble a team and register on the Imagine Cup website.

I get by with a little help from my friends (no blog is so great that it can’t be improved with a link to the Muppets) and if you want to attend the World Finals in Australia or the Canadian Finals in Toronto this year, you’ll find it easier with a little help from your friends as well.

It’s really easy:

1. Put together a team of 1-4 fellow students
2. Get each team member to register as a student at the Imagine Cup site.
3. One team member creates a new team and invites the rest of the team members
4. The other team members accept the invitation.

Now if you want to make sure you have dotted your “i”s and crossed your “t”s here are a few rules and regulations, the rules vary slightly from one competition to another so check the Imagine Cup site and look up the rules and regulations for your competition. The rules I mention here apply to Software Design and some of them apply to Windows Phone Game design as well.

A team is made up of 1-4 students

• If you are competing alone, you still need to create a new team and join it as an individual
• If you plan to compete for Canada, at least one member of the team must be a legal resident of Canada. 
• If you have teammates from other countries you will have to decide which country you plan to represent, a team can only represent one country.
• You cannot change teams once you sign up as part of a team after Round one closes
• You can have teammates from other faculties and even other schools if you want
• Having a team member with a business perspective can actually be beneficial and is a very common practice

Team members must be

• 16 years or older or have a parent or legal guardian’s permission to enter
• Enrolled as a student in high school, college, or university
• Not an employee or intern of Microsoft Corporation
• Not a family member of a Microsoft employee

Okay did you anyone notice my picture shows 5 people instead of 4? That’s because it’s also a great idea to get a mentor for your team to help you along. By the way if you are curious that awesome team up there includes myself (hockeygeekgirl), Frederic Harper (the man behind Make Web not War), Ruth Morton (host of Techtalk), Mitch Barnett (coolest platform architect in the West), and Alex Yakobovich (former Microsoft Student Partner and Windows Phone developer)