2022 is the 20th Anniversary of the Imagine Cup and the quality of the entries and the enthusiasm of the student teams continues to increase. Thousand of teams have taken part in the online stages of the contest. Now 48 teams gave been selected to progress to the World Finals.

The Imagine Cup is Microsoft's contest for teams of students from across the globe. Since it began 20 years ago, over 2 million students from over 100 countries around the world have participated. The competition has changed over the years, reflecting contemporary concerns and increasing expectations of what can be achieved through coding. 

According to Microsoft:

The 2022 Imagine Cup is where passion meets innovation—a place where students can build together with like-minded peers around the world to make a difference. 
 

This year's competition has categories in which to develop a project—Earth, Education, Health, and Lifestyle - and the other stipulations are that projects must include a Microsoft Azure component and take into consideration diversity, inclusion, and accessibility.

Registration was open from September 2021 to January 2022 and a new opportunity introduced into the schedule was that students had the option of joining an Imagine Cup kick-off event held on Microsoft Teams. They could also participate in the Epic Challenge as a preliminary step in their competition journey by submitting a  3-minute project pitch and proposal. One project from each of the three regions was selected at this stage to automatically advance to the World Finals and win USD1,000. The winners were:

• Americas Region
  KAPI, United States, Category: Education 
  Project description: A Keyboardless, ASL-inspired Programming Interface (KAPI), which leverages emerging low-code platforms (PyCaret, Github Co-Pilot) computer vision, and Machine Learning, so that people can sign their code using only a webcam. 
  
  
• Asia Region
  HireUsPls, Singapore, Category: Education
  Project description: KodeFlo is a web-based game application that uses Flow-Based Programming to teach programming concepts to children aged 10-14 years old. 
  
  
• EMEA Region
  

  Roz Development Team, Pakistan, Category: Health  
  Project description: A mobile application to assist in early detection of breast cancer.   

Now a further 15 teams from each region have been selected and details of the teams, of between one and four students, and their projects can be found in Meet the 2022 Imagine Cup World Finalists. 

They now head to the next stage where they will pitch their ideas to expert judges, demo their tech, and engage in a question and answer session as they compete for over USD50,000 in prizes. Projects will be judged on their innovative use of Azure technology, accessibility and inclusion, and marketability as a business idea.

The World Finalists will ultimately be whittled down to three, and in May, the 2022 Imagine Cup World Champion will be crowned with the winning team taking home the grand prize of USD100,000 and a mentoring session with Microsoft Chairman and CEO, Satya Nadella.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info