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Hundreds of students from around the world gathered
in New York City last week for the Microsoft Imagine Cup finals. They
came to present their ideas for using technology to solve world
problems.
Microsoft education director Suzi Levine says the nine-year-old program
began mainly as a competition to create technology.
SUZI LEVINE: "When we realized that students really actually want to
have a purpose for what they’re creating, we introduced the idea of
inspiring them with the UN Millennium Development Goals and suggesting
that they use those for their muse."
New sources for ideas this year included intergovernmental and
nongovernmental organizations.
SUZI LEVINE: "This past year we also rolled out something called the
Imagine Cup Solve This library, where IGOs, NGOs and nonprofits can
submit some of the technical challenges that they would like students to
consider for their solutions."
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Microsoft says over three hundred fifty thousand high school and college
students registered for this year's competition. Judges chose more than
four hundred of them to attend the finals.
Ms. Levine says several teams were inspired by current events, including
floods last year in Thailand.
SUZI LEVINE: “One from Thailand [was] called NewKrean, where they
created a Windows Phone 7 application that allows you to broadcast your
location to your social network of friends so that you can be more
easily rescued."
The NewKrean team from Chulalongkorn University in Thailand named their
app Terra.
Suzi Levine says there were also ideas from Egypt inspired by the
revolution that overthrew president Hosni Mubarak in February.
SUZI LEVINE: “One was to use Bluetooth as sort of a Twitter equivalent
so that if the government shuts down the Internet, you actually can
still have a massive social distribution.”
Students competed in nine categories. For example, in software design
the top prize of twenty-five thousand dollars went to Team Hermes from
Ireland. The students developed a device for cars to collect information
on road conditions, driving behavior and traffic incidents.
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A team from Taiwan's National Tsing Hua University won first place in
the embedded development category. They developed a network of wireless
devices to help plot the safest escape routes during a fire.
Next year’s awards ceremony will take place in Australia. Registration
for Imagine Cup twenty-twelve opened Friday. Also, Microsoft announced
plans for a three million dollar program to help Imagine Cup winners
further develop their projects.
And that's the VOA Special English Technology Report, written by June
Simms. You can learn English with our programs at voaspecialenglish.com.
I'm Steve Ember.
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