Imagine Cup US 2010 Finals – Day Three (Community Showcase)
It’s time I complete my series of posts related to the Imagine Cup. And what a way to end a weekend. The event was held at the Newseum, in downtown Washington D.C., a magnificent venue that I highly recommend visiting. I arrived at about 8:30, and immediately got ready to blog. Some of you may have sat in on my live blog. I was lucky enough to have Microsoft’s Alfred Thompson and GenInc.Tv’s Genevieve L’Esperance join the live stream. They covered the Game Design competition while I sat and watched the Software Design presentations. I was happy to see such innovative projects, and quite frankly was blown away by most of the presentations.
After all of the presentations, I made my way up to the Community Showcase. This is where the competitors get to show off their projects to important individuals visiting the event. There were people from Microsoft, Government, and the Media all present at the event. One notable journalist in attendance was Brennan LaBrie, 10 year old reporter for Time For Kids magazine. I highly recommend you check out his blog, as he has covered some great events and has done an excellent job bringing back the stories.
Next thing I knew, the special guest had arrived. That’s right, James Cameron, director of Avatar and Titanic, visited the Community Showcase. He was ushered from team to team by his staff, but I was lucky enough to snag two minutes of his time:
(Please forgive the horrible quality of the video. We were in very tight quarters.)
Next, we made our way back down to the presentation rooms to hear the keynote speaker, Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer. He spoke for a while about innovation and the future of technology. James Cameron also took the podium for a while, talking about what kind of technological innovation went into Avatar, and how Microsoft helped him create the movie.
And then it was time to find out who had won the competition. Mark Hindsbo, General Manger of Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism, took the stage once again to announce the winners of the GDI and SDI competition. The rankings were:
Software Design Teams
- Grand Prize: Mobilife, University of California, Davis
- First Prize: MangoBunnies, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, DePauw University
- Second Prize: Extraplaid, Utah State University
- Third Prize: Team Blob, South Dakota School of Mines & Technology
Game Teams
- Grand Prize: To Be Announced, Central Piedmont Community College & U North Carolina
- First Prize: Coffee Powered Altruism, Yale University
- Second Prize: Ifrit Salsa, University of Houston
- Third Prize: LeveL 13, University of Houston
It was truly an incredible accomplishment for each of these teams, and they each did a fantastic job. Everyone quickly cleared the stage so the teams could have their photo op. I returned to the Community Showcase, where I caught up with Anthony Salcito for a quick follow up question:
After that, it was time for me to head home. I said my goodbyes to all of the awesome people I had met, and made my way to the airport with MangoBunnies, Diane Curtis, and a few other Microsoft developers. Next thing I knew, I was on my plane and returning to Port Huron.
I just wanted to conclude by giving a special thanks to Austin Stewart, Jessica Anderson, Hilary Pike, Diane Curtis, and Alfred Thompson. Thank you all so much for making my time in D.C. so fantastic.
Until next time,
Patrick Godwin
Imagine Cup US 2010 Finals – Day Two
Sunday morning was the more relaxed day of the competition. No one was presenting to any judges on Sunday. Everyone seemed a bit relaxed. Sure they had a big announcement coming later that day, but it was time to rest.
The day consisted of the competitors going around the D.C. Office attending sessions about new Microsoft technologies. They had sessions about the KIN, NUI, .Net, Windows Phone, and plenty more. I was able to sit in on the NUI/Natal session, which was very informative and interesting.
Between sessions, I was able to catch up with Team AwesomeSauce, a game design team, and talk with them about their project:
After that, I sat in on the Microsoft Recruiting session, to learn a bit about what it’s like to interview for a technical position at Microsoft. I’m not going to go into details about that session now, but I will cover the important notes in a later blog post.
Before long, 4:20PM rolled around. I made my way to the room where the finalists would be announced, and got ready to tweet the results. During the time before the announcement, I chatted with Mark Hindsbo, General Manager of Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism for Microsoft USA, about the event. He was excited to see so many young people passionate about computer science and innovation. He felt proud to be a part of the event. Before I knew it, the time was 4:30 and the announcement had to begin.
The announcement started of with Jessica Anderson, the business manager for Microsoft Student Insiders, talking about the trip to the Newseum for the finals. Once that was done, the announced that special guest James Cameron, director of Avatar and Titanic, would be joining us for the finals at the Newseum.
Once the logistics was out of the way, it was time to announce who was going to be competing on Monday. Mark Hindsbo took center stage, announcing the top 4 SDI and GDI teams:
Software Design Teams
- Extraplaid, Utah State University
- MangoBunnies, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, DePauw University
- Mobilife, University of California, Davis
- Team Blob, South Dakota School of Mines & Technology
Game Teams
- Coffee Powered Altruism, Yale University
- Ifrit Salsa, University of Houston
- LeveL 13, University of Houston
- To Be Announced, Central Piedmont Community College
After this, each team was debriefed, and the rest of us made our way back to the hotel for some rest before another busy day.
Imagine Cup US 2010 Finals – Day One
The first day here at the Imagine Cup was pretty hectic, with competitors scrambling to make sure their presentations were ready for the judges. Each team was given a 50 minute block of time with a panel of judges, where they would demo their project, pitch their business plan, and field questions from the judges. After that, they were released from their presentation rooms to talk with the camera crews from Microsoft Press. I was lucky enough to grab a few minutes with some of the teams for a filmed interview.
Team Extraplaid:
Team Team Name Not Found:
Team Darkwing Duck:
Imagine Cup US 2010 Finals – Anthony Salcito Interview
During the first day of the US Imagine Cup Finals, I had the pleasure to speak with Anthony Salcito, Microsoft’s Vice President of Worldwide Education. We talked about the need for new approaches to technology in education, and then spoke for a while about what the Imagine Cup means for Microsoft and for the community. I filmed our conversation about the Imagine Cup, which you can watch below. A very special thanks to Austin Stewart, from Microsoft’s PR team, who helped get me this great opportunity to meet Mr. Salcito.
More tomorrow morning.
Microsoft Student Insider Kick-Off: Scott Hanselman
During my time at the Redmond campus, I was fortunate enough to meet with Scott Hanselman, Principal Program Manger Lead for Microsoft’s Developer Division. He also runs a very successful blog and podcast. Mr. Hanselman’s position at Microsoft requires him to travel a lot. This, combined with his living in Oregon, makes it difficult to snag a meeting with him. But we were lucky enough to meet with Mr. Hanselman for an hour in Building 5.
We started off our time with Mr. Hanselman by introducing ourselves. He then lectured us on the history of Bulletin Board Systems, relating it to a recent interview he had done on his podcasts. He then talked about his blog, and how useful social media is.
And then we got to the new technology. Mr. Hanselman first showed us Boot to VHD, a new feature in WIndows 7 that allows us to take the VHDs created in Virtual PC 2007, Hyper-V, and other parts of the virtualization platform, and boot our machine to this virtual OS. This allows the virtual hard disk to use hardware rather than the emulated environment when running. This follows the idea of “less virtual, more machine”.
The next demos Mr. Hanselman showed us struck me as very cool. He decided to demonstrate two new features of .Net 4.0: PLINQ and MEF. Now when I heard him say PLINQ, I had to do a double take. My understanding was PLINQ had been around for at least a year. But I was happily surprised to find that PLINQ (Parallel Language Integrated Query) was finally shipping as a part of the .Net Framework. This made me happy. Finally I could add support for multi-core processors with very little hassle. Simply invoke a query with the .AsParrallel() extension method, and you’ve got yourself a query working across multiple cores. There are other features in PLINQ, and I urge you to check out the Parallel Programming With .Net blog for more info.
The final demo Mr. Hanselman showed us was MEF. MEF stands for the Managed Extensibility Framework. Imagine the following situation: You are an enterprise developer working for a company that keeps inventory of different kinds of cars. Each car has similar qualities, defined in an interface, while being unique in itself. Your boss approaches you, requiring a new brand be added to the application used for keeping inventory. Due to the lack of a quality plugin system, this task would be very tedious and an all around pain in the neck. What MEF allows you to do, is simply create your new class, implementing this interface, export it through a new DLL, and the inventory application will do a “composition”, loading any and all classes that use the interface declared in the core of the API. I was extremely excited when Mr. Hanselman showed us this new feature. I’ve always loved the idea of extensibility, but hated using slow Reflection based techniques for dynamically loading classes. I highly recommend you take a look at MEF over on CodePlex. It’s a very cool framework and could make great leaps in improving application development productivity.
After that demo, we had to go our separate ways again. Like I said, Mr. Hanselman is a very busy man, and I was very grateful to have met with him. I highly suggest your follow him on Twitter or read his blog, as he frequently provides interesting links related to social media and new technology.
about me
Welcome! My name is Patrick Godwin, and I'm a Computer Science Engineering Major at the University of Michigan. I'm a Microsoft Student Insider focusing on XNA, Kinect, and now Windows 8 Metro Style Apps. I'm very interested in areas surrounding NUI, Game Development, and Web Application Development.
While I primarily focus on Microsoft technologies, I am expanding to work with Node.js and other OSS technology. On this blog you'll find my thoughts, findings, and dablings with different technologies and events, like the Imagine Cup and MIX.