Meet the Phone Game Design finalists for Canadian Imagine Cup - Go DevMENTAL - Site Home

Meet the teams who will be competing in the Windows Phone Game Design category at the Canadian Imagine Cup to win phones, Xbox, Kinect, mentorship opportunities and more!

Last week our judges narrowed down the Canadian entries in Phone Game Design to the top three who we have invited to come present their games on stage at the Canadian Imagine Cup finals April 30th at the University of Waterloo. Game development has become a huge industry over the years. These teams were challenged to not only build a game but tie it to the 2012 Imagine Cup Theme “Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems”. You can come out and cheer the teams at the finals, register here.

Let’s meet the teams who will be competing at the Canadian finals, in alphabetical order by team name.

Novarum from Carleton University

The Problem: Our team is attempting to solve the problem of world hunger, as well as the issues of active participation from the mass population in solving such problems.

Our Solution: Our team is attempting to solve the problem of world hunger by donating to an effective charity that makes a real impact in the world. We do this by raising funds via in-game advertising and raising awareness through gameplay.

Team Novarum: Ryan Bottriel, Zara Tooth, Matthew Fournier, Skye Gagne and Jean-Sylvain Sormany (mentor)


Phylo from McGill University The Problem: Traditionally, multiple sequence alignment algorithms use computationally complex heuristics to align the sequences. Unfortunately, the use of heuristics do not guarantee global optimization as it would be prohibitively computationally expensive to achieve an optimal alignment. This is due in part to the sheer size of the genome, which consists of roughly three billion base pairs, and the increasing computational complexity resulting from each additional sequence in an alignment. Our Solution: Humans have evolved to recognize patterns and solve visual problems efficiently. By abstracting multiple sequence alignment to manipulating patterns consisting of coloured shapes, we have adapted the problem to benefit from human capabilities. By taking data which has already been aligned by a heuristic algorithm, we allow the user to optimize where the algorithm may have failed.	Team Phylo: Chu Wu, Alfred Kam, Jerome Waldispuhl (mentor)

Project Beacon from Carleton University The Problem: The problem with today’s society is that we take the environment for granted. We know the consequences but we lack the mentality to change because it does not affect us directly in our daily lives. Environmental damage is a long-term process that can only be solved through environmental sustainability, and with that, we will ensure future generations will live in a safe and sustainable world. Our Solution: The goal of Project Beacon is to show, through a game, the impact of human activity on the planet, and how actions of one person can help to improve the environment. Our game will highlight the importance of renewable energy sources (sun, wind, water), and focus on the art style in order to show, visually, a shift between a polluted world and a clean world.	Team Project Beacon: Gar Lam, Clark McGillis, Curtis Field, Eva Demers-Brett and Jean-Sylvain Sormany (mentor)

Congratulations again to our Canadian finalists and to all the other great entries we received in the Windows Phone game category! It's students like you who inspire all of us to make a difference! We’ll see you at the finals!