Microsoft Imagine Cup U.S. finals: Team Multipoint wins

By Microsoft Subnet on Wed, 05/06/09 - 2:54pm.

A team of brothers has won the U.S. finals of the Microsoft Imagine Cup on Tuesday and we have a video of this project, and two others, to make you feel like you were there. The Imagine Cup, now in its seventh year, is Microsoft's contest for high school and college students worldwide in which teams develop software with the aim of solving global social, economic or environmental problems. The U.S. finals were held in Boston.

The youngest member of team Multipoint is still in high school. The three brothers from Oregon (Jimmy, Mark and Luke Dickinson) created a Silverlight extension to one of Microsoft's existing education systems that allows multiple students to use the same computer at the same time, maximizing the use of limited hardware. The project is intended to stretch the budgets of schools that don't have the funds for large computer labs. MultiPoint Web includes a component that lets users store lessons, courses, and activities to be shared around the world in multiple languages via a Web interface.

The team will represent the U.S. in the worldwide finals held in Cairo, Egypt, in July. Prizes for Imagine Cup 2009 will total more than $180,000 (U.S.) across the nine categories in which students are competing, Microsoft says.

Here's an overview of the finals, with a preview of several more of the final projects

This project shows just how creative some of the entries were. This is a Windows mobile application intended to help teens become better drivers. The application blocks texting when a person is driving. But wait, there's more. It also collects data on how well the person is driving -- such as rapid starts and stops. It can alert the teen (and the parent) if the teen is driving poorly.

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