MSDN Student Flash : Imagine Cup

Heard at theSpoke

kevinbri — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 19:42:00 GMT

Dave is taking a new job working for the Xbox division. He's started to blog about what that work is all about. It looks like he's in for some fun time and will have a lot of interesting things to talk about in the coming weeks and months. If you are at all interested in game programming you may want to watch his blog.

Meanwhile, Morris Sim is introducing a lot of information about the upcoming Imagine Cup finals in Japan. He's got information and links to videos. Even if you are not going to Japan you will want to check these out. Who knows, it may help motivate you to enter next year's event.

Speaking of video, Channel 9 has a new video interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

- Alfred Thompson (Microsoft)

Imagine Cup US SDI winners up on Tablet PC Dev Center

kevinbri — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 20:05:00 GMT

Team ECESIS from Virginia Commonwealth, who won the US Software Design Invitational in Imagine Cup, are highlighted up on the MSDN Tablet PC Developer Center! They are also starting up a blog about their experiences on the run up to Japan. They had a great article written up about them in their local paper too (and I even like my quote).

Last and certainly not least, the Channel 9 video of some of the competitors is finally up!

-Kevin

More Imagine Cup photos are up

kevinbri — Tue, 24 May 2005 00:12:00 GMT

Thomas Nguyen has posted a bunch of his pictures from this weekend - Thomas was a competitor in Imagine Cup from the University of Houston with their AgileAgents project.

For any competitors who attended and took pics, if you want to share them email me (Kevin) or post them to Flickr with the tag imaginecup.

-Kevin

Northeastern University takes 3rd!

kevinbri — Tue, 24 May 2005 00:07:00 GMT

Congratulations to Northeastern's Team Splines and their eVt applicaiton for taking 3rd place!

Jorel Fermin, Churk Leung, Maurice Peltier

About eVt, in their own words (and their bios, in Word):

The ability to communicate has been one of the greatest and oldest boundaries that humanity has faced. Communication through language plays an integral part in activities ranging from receiving proper medical assistance to sharing ideas. Problems arise when language barriers or physical challenges prevent people from communicating their wishes or needs through language. eVt changes all of this. Those who formerly could not share their thoughts can use eVt as a medium for the transmission and expression of ideas. eVt is an application designed to enable the use of technologies such as speech-to-text, text-to-speech and language translation in series with such devices as Smartphones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and laptops with the purpose of overcoming the boundaries of language.

eVt uses the key technologies Visual C#^®, ASP.NET, Microsoft^® .NET Framework 1.1, Microsoft Speech Application Software Developer Kit 5.1, Windows^® XP Professional, Windows 2000 Server, Microsoft Windows Mobile™ 2003 for Pocket PC Software Development Kit.

Carnegie Mellon takes 2nd place!

kevinbri — Mon, 23 May 2005 23:57:00 GMT

Congratulations to Team Smartcare from Carnegie Mellon University, for taking home 2nd place in the US National Finals of the Imagine Cup 2005, Software Design Invitational!

Bryan Shen, Mark Pimental, and Andy Shen

About Smartcare, in their own words (full bios here, in Word)
SmartCare is a healthcare platform that provides easy, more-secure sharing of patient information without the need to completely replace existing information technology infrastructure. Relying on electronic medical record standards such as Health Level Seven (HL7) and Continuity of Care Record (CCR), hospitals will be able to interface with the SmartCare system to connect, search and correspond with the national network of healthcare providers.

SmartCare also provides the tools to use this information toward more efficient management of appointments, tasks and communications for healthcare workers. Through the SmartCare Task Scheduler, a patient’s medical records will be analyzed alongside dynamic feeds of vital signs and other monitoring information to provide hospital wards with improved tracking, alert and error-reporting services.

Team Smartcare utilized the Microsoft® .NET Framework to its fullest. ASP.NET, ADO.NET and XML Web services are used to create the Web interfaces necessary to interconnect medical databases. The SmartCare Task Scheduler runs on Microsoft Windows Mobile™ 2003 software for Pocket PCs and uses Visual C#® under the .NET Compact Framework 1.1.

Virginia Commonwealth University takes the title!

kevinbri — Mon, 23 May 2005 23:44:00 GMT

Sorry this took so long to post (we needed a nap after all the excitement):

AND THE WINNER OF THE US NATIONAL FINALS for the Imagine Cup Software Design Invitational

IS

Team ECESIS from Virginia Commonwealth University!
Congrats to James Barrett, John McKeon, and John Sells!
See the press release here.

ECESIS is a Tablet PC - targeted .NET application that helps young kids learn how to write, and also provides some great tools for their teachers and parents.

James, John, and John next have a couple months of working on their app before taking it to the Imagine Cup World Finals in Yokohama, Japan at the end of July. There they'll represent the US and compete against students from dozens of other countries for big cash prizes and some massive bragging rights.

Here's their project abstract (get it and their bios here, in Word):

ECESIS is an application that runs in the Tablet PC environment and that can be used in early-childhood education classrooms to facilitate writing instruction. Using the application, students will complete a series of lessons that have been created with help from education faculty members from Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of South Alabama. These lessons will be stored on the application server and distributed to client applications by way of Web services. Data collected on the client machine will be stored in the Microsoft^® Data Engine (MSDE) when the Tablet PC is not connected to the network and transported to a centralized server running Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 and using Web services when connectivity has been re-established.

The ECESIS system will provide objective feedback and scoring of student progress, and includes a Web reporting interface using SQL Server Reporting Services that will be accessible to parents, teachers and school administrators. The ECISIS team has modularized the Web reporting interface and the writing instruction application to facilitate the development of additional instructional modules that will provide feedback through the common Web reporting interface.

Defining an Imagine Cup region

kevinbri — Sun, 22 May 2005 03:41:00 GMT

In case you read the Regional results below and wondered how Boston U could end up in the Northwest Region, or University of Hawaii Manoa in the Mid-Atlantic reason, here's the answer: The names are just a fun way to break up the competition into smaller chunks, and aren't geographically relevant to the locations of the schools in them. Basically, it was more interesting to put "Midwest Region" on a 1st Place trophy than, say, "Region 4". :)

Imagine Cup - mobile graffiti

kevinbri — Sun, 22 May 2005 03:40:00 GMT

John Gibby and Peter Pesti of Georgia Tech are presenting their application called "mGraffiti", which is all about using a mobile device to apply "graffiti", or personal notes and comments, about key spots (like your work building, favorite restaurant, hangout) in your life overlaid on top of sattellite maps.

Very cool, I love the mobile angle on this.

-Kevin

The official Imagine Cup US Finals info

kevinbri — Sun, 22 May 2005 03:13:00 GMT

You know you're official when you get up on Microsoft PressPass! For lots of great stuff about this 2-day event in Redmond, take a look at this site. Including:

Student bios and project abstracts (plus some of their photos)

Image gallery, which will go live next week. For the informal pics, you can check out some shots here.

And a fact sheet and FAQ.

Enjoy!

Imagine Whirlwind

kevinbri — Sun, 22 May 2005 02:55:00 GMT

This year's competition is just a whirlwind compared to last year. In 2004's US Imagine Cup we hosted 4 regional competitions around the country, then the top 2 teams from each advanced to the US Finals at TechEd San Diego. Those 8 teams spent an afternoon at UC San Diego doing 30 minute presentations to a panel of judges.

For 2005 we collapsed the Regional competition and National finals into one day, and just invited every student team out to Redmond to compete. 30+ teams competed in 9 small group "regional" competitions this morning on Microsoft Main Campus. The first place team from each advanced to the National Round in the afternoon, which is about halfway done. A loooooong day for the students, judges, and everyone involved, but I'm simply amazed at the quality and originality of many of the student projects, so well worth the lack of sleep!

James posted the regional results below, and a big congratulations to all the teams. Once Nationals wraps, we'll post the Top 3 (and the team that heads to Japan this summer) and some thoughts on the final applications. The designs are worth sharing widely - we'll also look into featuring the students on MSDN and elsewhere, so stay tuned for more.

-Kevin

Imagine Cup US Nationals are rolling!

kevinbri — Fri, 20 May 2005 18:34:00 GMT

Soma Somasegar, VP in Developer Division at Microsoft, talks about the Imagine Cup student technology competition we're putting together today and tomorrow in Redmond. Scoble is coming over this morning to meet with a bunch of them (and hopefully shoot some channel 9 video!).

Watch this space as James, Eric and I will be blogging the event realtime (sort of). We’ll try to get some pics up on Flickr or somewhere as well (watch for links).

Imagine Cup: University of Houston Student gets some press!

kevinbri — Fri, 13 May 2005 20:22:00 GMT

Johnathan Dowdall and Mike Hall from the University of Houston have both advanced in the Imagine Cup's Visual Gaming competition, and get some press in Medical New Today as a result!

Stay tuned for more coverage of Imagine Cup. We are gearing up here in Redmond for the US National Finals of the Software Design Invitational, with over 100 students flying in from all over the country to compete. We'll have (nearly) live coverage here and in the e-newsletter throughout, and rumor has it Channel 9 will be doing a video as well. The competition is next Friday and Saturday, May 20-21st on Microsoft Main Campus in Redmond. Stay tuned!

Are you a creative person?

kevinbri — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 14:41:00 GMT

As many of you know the Visual Gaming event in the Imagine Cup uses "tissues" which are the maze that the nano robots have to move through. There is a contest for people to create their own tissues that can be used in round two. You do not have to be a programmer at all to do this. The needed files can be created with Paint and Notepad. All you need to create are a BMP file that shows the color coded tissue and a text file that explains what is where in the tissue. Check it out and have some fun with it. Details at the AZN Team Leader blog.

Alfred (Microsoft)

New Project Hoshimi Manga

kevinbri — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 17:33:00 GMT

Richard has posted some drafts of the new Project Hoshimi manga at theSpoke. Images only - no dialog. Still I wonder what clues you can find there. If you are into the Imagine Cup Visual Gaming event you will want to check these out.

Alfred (Microsoft)

One day left to compete in IT, Algorithm, and Visual Gaming!

kevinbri — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 16:48:00 GMT

Some of the easiest ways to compete - and get your free stuff - close tomorrow night March 1st! So read on for updates on the IT, Algorithm, and Visual Gaming invitationals.

Here's how to get started: For any of the competitions, after you register, go to Team & Event Tools and scroll down to the competition. Select "Go take the quiz" or for team events you'll be prompted to create or join a team.

Algorithm:
Algorithm is a 30-minute, 30-question online quiz for Round 1. The top 200 scorers worldwide advance to Round 2 where your coding skills are put to the test.

How things are shaping up in the US: (click here for the Worldwide Leaderboard)
Ashley Ashford from Columbia College is #2 worldwide right now, Ruoming Pang from Princeton also in the top 10. For the US, both MIT and Rutgers have two students each in the US top 10, with Cal, Texas, Ohio State, and University of Chicago rounding out the top of the leaderboard.

Sample question:
Which of these is the correct big-O expression for 1+2+3+…+n?
a)       O(log n)
b)       O(n)
c)       O(n log n)
d)       O( n^2)
Answer: d

Information Technology:
The IT first round challenge is also a 30-minute, 30-question quiz. The top 10 overall and the top 5 from every country advance to the second round, and the final 6 to the World Finals in Japan.

How things are shaping up the US: (click here for the Worldwide Leaderboard)
William Long (Texas A&M) and Josh Blake (James Madison) are leading the US standings and are in the top 10 worldwide! Rounding out the US top 5 are: Brian Desmond from Walter Payton College Prep High School, Iwan Kinal from Columbia University, and Jeff Tjiputra from the College of Southern Maryland.

Sample question:
Which physical network topology is used on 10BaseT Ethernet networks?
a)       bus
b)       mesh
c)       ring
d)       star
Answer: d

Visual Gaming:
The visual gaming first round challenge is an SDK based competition where you write the code behind a team of nano-robots. Check out the SDK, characters, and back story - Project Hoshimi.

How things are shaping up in the US: (click here for the Worldwide Leaderboard)
Team ContAInment from the University of Houston is currently #5 on the worldwide leaderboard and leading the US, with teams from James Madison University, UC San Diego, University of Texas-Arlington, and DePaul rounding out the US top 5!

The winning team in the World Finals will also get a one week internship with Gas Powered Games, makers of the upcoming Dungeon Siege II! All competitors who advance to the third round of the competition will receive a free copy of Dungeon Siege II when it releases.

The 3D viewer was the picture of the day on flipcode recently.
You can download the tutorials and SDK here.

Other ways to compete:
If you prefer more in-depth experiences, head to the Imagine Cup site and click on Office Designer, Rendering, Short Film, Technology Business Plan, or Web Development, all of which are open for new entries until April 1st. Software Design has already closed for new entries in the United States, but may still be open in other countries (check here for more information).

-Kevin (Microsoft)