Students from around the globe went to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington last week for the Imagine Cup World Finals. The team that goes home as this year's champion is Team ENTy from Romania.

By this stage of the competition, the thirty five teams of students had already won their national or regional contests in competition with hundreds of other student teams who had respond to the challenge of entering Microsoft's student technology competition.

Now in its 14th year this competition motivates young developers to create innovative apps and acquire both technical skills and business skills. 

From the pool of entries that were judged at the World Semifinal stage nine teams in the Games category and thirteen each in Innovation and World Citizenship were selected to fly to Seattle. The top three teams in each category are listed here, follow the links to find out more about team members and get a description of their projects).

Games:

1^st Place:  $50,000  PH21, Thailand
2^nd Place: $10,000  None Developers, Indonesia
3^rd Place: $5,000     Tower Up, Brazil

Innovation:

1^st Place:  $50,000  ENTy, Romania
2^nd Place: $10,000   Bit Masters, Sri Lanka
3^rd Place: $5,000      HealthX, United States

World Citizenship:

1^st Place:  $50,000   AMANDA, Greece
2^nd Place: $10,000   Night’s Watch,Tunisia
3^rd Place: $5,000     ImSimu, Hungary

The celebrity judge panel, actor John Boyega from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Dr. Jennifer Tang, a member of the Eyenemia team which won the 2014 Imagine Cup and Kasey Champion, Computer Science Curriculum Developer at Microsoft then had to decide which of three projects should be the overall winner:

• PH21 of Thailand created a stealth puzzle game with an unpredictable storyline and an unusual gameplay system. The player controls Marza, a mysterious woman who has stolen a device with the power to see the future, and Alpha, a little girl who has the ability to manipulate time. The two characters must cooperate to overcome obstacles and find the best route for each puzzle.
  
  
• The AMANDA team of Greece developed a gamified virtual reality app to help combat bullying. It puts users in 3D interactive scenes, many involving bullying, to gauge their responses and focus on boosting empathy, awareness and self-esteem. The project is named for Amanda Todd, a Canadian teen who made a video detailing her experience of being bullied before taking her own life in 2012.
  
  
• The ENTy team of Romania created a high-tech wearable device that tracks the balance of the internal ear and checks the spine posture in real time. The device is the size of a door key and is worn on the back or head and can detect inner ear problems and other data that can be useful to doctors in diagnosing patients.

Winners ENTy - Iulian Matesica (hardware engineer architect), Cristian Alexandrescu (UX Designer) and Flavia Oprea (product developer) - will have a private mentoring session with Satya Nadella in addition to the coveted trophies. 

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