| Microsoft announces winners of student software competition |
May 23, 2005
 A team from Virginia Commonwealth University took first place in the US finals of the Imagine Cup 2005 Software Design Invitational held this past weekend. Imagine Cup is sponsored by Microsoft to recognize "creative and technological innovations in the worldwide student community," according to the company.
(Click here for larger image of VCU team members John McKeon, James Barrett, and John Sells)
The winning entry, called ECESIS, is a Tablet PC application that facilitates writing instruction in early-childhood education classrooms. According to the team, students complete a series of lessons that are stored on the application server and distributed to client applications via Web services. ECESIS provides objective feedback and scoring of student progress, and includes a Web reporting interface accessible to parents, teachers and school administrators. the winning team received a cash award of $8,000, plus $1,000 for placing first in the regional competition, and a trip to the worldwide finals in Yokohama, Japan.
Second place went to the team from Carnegie Mellon University for SmartCare, a healthcare platform that provides easy and secure sharing of patient information without the need to completely replace existing information technology infrastructure. The team says that Smartcare uses electronic medical record standards such as Health Level Seven (HL7) and Continuity of Care Record (CCR), to enable medical professionals to connect, search, and correspond with the national network of healthcare providers. The team received a cash award of $4,000, plus $1,000 for placing first in the regional competition.
The team from Northeastern University garnered third place for eVt, which "strives to resolve communication barriers such as language or geography," according to the team. eVt enables the use of technologies such as speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and language translation together with devices like Smartphones, PDAs, and laptops to overcome the boundaries of language. The team received a cash award of $2,000, plus $1,000 for placing first in the regional competition.
Microsoft describes the Imagine Cup, now in its third year, as a competition that provides an "outlet for students to explore technological and artistic interests outside the classroom." According to Microsoft, more than 10,000 students from over 90 countries competed in the nine Imagine Cup 2005 invitationals, which include Algorithm, Information Technology (IT), Office Designer, Rendering, Short Film, Software Design, Technology Business Plan, Visual Gaming, and Web Development.
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