Microsoft Challenge you Could Win 25 Thousand Dollars

Microsoft is holding yet another of their Imagine Cup competitions this year. This year they have three categories to compete in. The categories are as follows: Software Development, Game Design, and an IT Challenge. There is a reward of 25 thousand dollars and participation is open to anyone who would like to dip their hands in this wonderful opportunity. The following was sent to Stacy Hughes and goes as follows. Also if you would like to know more about this then please email Stacy at Stacy.Hughes@neumont.edu

Microsoft’s Imagine Cup competition is one of the world’s largest student technology competitions, and while the dust is still settling from last July’s record-breaking World Finals in New York, I am happy to announce that the 2012 United States Imagine Cup competition has started and is bigger and better than ever. In 2012 the US is hosting its own Software Design, Game Design, and IT Challenge competitions in Redmond, WA, and the World Finals will be held in Sydney, Australia. In addition to travel, prize money, great PR, and a life-changing experience for your students, we have expanded the $25,000 departmental team sponsor prize to include both Software Design and Game Design (more details below) winners.

Some of last year’s finalists developed solutions that helped partially-blind students take notes in class, screen blood samples for malaria using a mobile phone, and help students with asthma manage their symptoms by playing a video game that requires breathing through a special tube. Some projects were developed just for the competition and others were developed for research or to fill a course requirement and then were entered as a secondary objective. Many of our winners were undergraduate students, but a couple great projects came from graduate research and labs.

The United States runs two Imagine Cup competitions per year to better align with the academic calendar; one in the Fall and one in the Spring. The Fall competition historically has about the half as many competitors than the Spring competition, and finalists are chosen from both so there is a big advantage for competing in the Fall. Fall finalists are announced by the end of November, so teams that are selected in Fall get about 4 months to polish their projects. Spring winners are announced in March and will have less than 6 weeks to polish and complete their projects, so the advantages of competing in Fall are almost overwhelming if you can get your team formed and plans submitted by the Fall Round One deadline of October 14th. Teams that are not selected as finalists in the Fall are allowed (and encouraged) to keep working on their projects, incorporate judging feedback and resubmit them in the Spring.

The Competitions

Software Design – Round One Deliverables

• Team Registration
• Draft Business Plan
• Due October 14th at 5pm

Game Design – Round One Deliverables

• Team Registration
• Draft Game Storyboard
• Due October 14th at 5pm

IT Challenge – Round One

• Pass quiz on website with score of 15 or higher
• Due TBD

As you can see it is easy to get started. The good news is that Round One for Software Design and Game Design is a project milestone date and is not judged. You can literally form a team, write a storyboard or business plan draft and submit an entry in under an hour. Your Round One entry shows your intent and automatically advances your team to Round Two. For the IT Challenge, you can take the tests as often as you like; score above 15 and you automatically advance to the next round.

The Software Design and Game Design competitions are team competitions; students can form teams of up to four students plus a faculty mentor. The IT Challenge is an individual competition that aligns with Microsoft’s IT Certifications.

Software Development – Round Two Deliverables

• Updated Business Plan
• Beta Code
• 3-5 minute video presentation (think infomercial)
• Due November 14th at 5pm

Game Design – Round Two Deliverables

• Playable game executable (at least one complete level)
• Written game summary
• Game instructions
• 3-5 minute game demo video
• Due November 14th at 5pm

IT Challenge – Round Two

• Case Study
• Due TBD

The Rewards

Ten Software Design, Twenty Game Design (ten in each category) and Ten IT Challenge Competitors will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to the Imagine Cup US finals in April 2012 at the Microsoft Redmond Campus. First, Second and Third place teams will receive cash prizes. The winner of the US Software Design competition also will represent the US at the Imagine Cup World Finals at Sydney, Australia in July 2012. Mentors in Software Design and Game Design are also given paid travel to support their teams.

Imagine Cup competitors also get invaluable experience that is highly valued by recruiters. Many Imagine Cup competitors get interviews and job offers from Microsoft. Even if a student team doesn’t get selected as a finalist, they can add their experience to their resumes and may qualify for honorable mention, which can add important differentiation in today’s challenging job market.

Last year the first-place team in the Software Design category not only won a cash prize for the team members, they also won a $25,000 prize for their mentor’s department. This year, we are expanding the departmental sponsor grant award to include both Software Design and Game Design winners.

Resources

Besides the resources listed on the Imagine Cup web page, your school may qualify for an on-campus Imagine Cup workshop. Microsoft has fielded a team of regional developer evangelists that can come to campus, explain the details of the competition, and walk interested students through the sign-up, brainstorming, team formation, and business plan/storyboard submission; from zero to Round One in less than two hours. Interested in using Windows 7, Kinect, or Windows 8? Your school may also qualify for a technical jump-start workshop to get you from plan to code as quickly as possible.

Thankyou for reading.

Dylan Ray Goelz

Microsoft Announces Student of the Month - Kevin Ballinas

As published on MSDN Blogs, May 26th, 2011:

As the month of May comes to a close, it is time to profile our sixth Microsoft Tech Student of the Month. We have chosen Kevin Ballinas, a computer science student in his junior year at Neumont University. Kevin has had the unique opportunity of attending a school that is one hundred percent focused on computer science education. As a result, Kevin has worked on a number of innovative and original technology projects over the course of his student career. These include Windows apps, Web apps, and even software that work in the cloud and on mobile devices!

Kevin’s interest in computer science began at a very young age. As a fourth grader, he took it upon himself to fix the broken computers in his classroom. He played around with each of the components, learned their functions, and applied that knowledge back to the repair process. This process of trial and error allowed Kevin to learn very quickly while getting hands on experience. He was able to download games onto the computers and soon enough they were up and running and accessible to the other students. After elementary school, Kevin moved to the suburbs and was exposed to rich technology programs where he got started in basic web programming. His interest in computer science flourished when he heard about software engineering from a teacher. In his sophomore year, he took a class that introduced him to the Java programming language. He familiarized himself with java further by taking two more Java-related courses as well as a web development course for more general training. Although Kevin had other interests such as architecture and cooking, his passion for technology stuck and ultimately drove his decision for where he wanted to go to college.

Kevin is now attending Neumont University, a project-based Bachelor’s program fully focused in computer science. It’s here that Kevin has really been able to explore his passion for programming at a much higher level. One of the first major projects he worked on was to create a Battleship game with a team of 4-5 people. The project tested the team’s knowledge in data transfer using TCP in Java, XML parsing, and building graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Some other projects involved creating a Monopoly-based game and an E-commerce site, both using Java.

After some of these early Java projects, Kevin and his teammates decided to leverage Microsoft technologies to create a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) music player. This is no ordinary music player in that it automatically rates each song according to how quickly the user skips through it and uses that information to play songs the user will want to hear in the future based on the highest ratings. The music player is named “THInK” which was inspired by the letters in each teammate’s name: Tyler Garland, Jesus Rodriguez, Israel Campos and Kevin Ballinas. The team created the GUI for THInK using Expression Blend which students can download for free through theDreamspark Program.

The most recent project that Kevin completed at Neumont is a website called GradeMy<T> which is a take on Rate My Teacher. Kevin and his teammates Tyler Garland, Jorge Sanchez and Ruddy Arroliga built the web application using ASP.NET MVC. It is a completely user-driven website that users can use to rate anything they want. People create categories and specify any additional information that may be needed to identify each item in that category. For example, in the movie category there was a year and director tag associated with each film. The team took advantage of LINQ to select relevant items from such a large and complex database.

Currently, Kevin and some members of the original THInK team are getting back together to take their music player to the cloud. They have recruited some new teammates including Eban Korey Simon, Ruddy Arroliga, Jorge Sanchez, Nick Erickson and Cludio Salcido to help with the major revisions. The new music player will be called RETHINCK and will live in the cloud using Windows Azure so users can access their music anywhere while on the go. The plan is to create a Windows Phone 7 app and in-browser music player so users can access the software wherever they are. The team is going to create a WCF service that will be the connection between the applications and data. They are also implanting an achievement system through the IActionable API. The API makes it easy for developers to add a gamification component to their apps. It was founded by two Neumont alumni and they offered Kevin’s team the opportunity to use the technology for free. We’re hoping to see this really cool cloud music player released in the next year!

Kevin is expecting to graduate and receive his Computer Science Bachelor’s degree in June 2012. He is still sorting out his career plans but his dream is to work for Microsoft as a software developer working on ground breaking technologies. From every one of the Microsoft Tech Student team, we wish Kevin and his colleagues best of luck in building the RETHINCK music player and having a successful final year at Neumont University. We appreciate all his hard work and encourage him to follow the successful path he has taken thus far. Keep up the awesome work!