Decoding Idea Submission Round for Imagine Cup

Decoding Idea Submission Round of Imagine Cup

We have had a lot of buzz around Imagine Cup these days as idea submission deadlines are approaching. Imagine Cup is a global student technology program and competition that provides opportunities for students across all disciplines to team up and use their creativity, passion and knowledge of technology to create applications, games and integrate solutions that can change the way we live, work and play.

Imagine Cup will provide you an opportunity to bring your bold ideas to life. I can’t think of a big opportunity to turn your dreams into reality and taking the first step in turning it into a business during student life.

The good thing about Imagine Cup is it gives chance to almost all students to try their luck and to participate with any skill set. Imagine Cup has competitions and contests are divided into 3 categories, according to their technical aptitude:

1. Beginner – No or little coding required
2. Medium – Some experience in Coding
3. Advanced – Experienced Student Developers

This time, we have 3 global competitions and 2 online contests in Imagine Cup.

During my college days, I always participated in multiple technical contests. There are typically 3 important phases for any competition:

1. Ideation and Conceptualization
2. Implementation
3. Packaging and Presentation

Ideation and Conceptualization: With a hypothesis that you have already formed your dream team for the competition, the next crucial phase is all about ideation and preparing concept note. There are multiple ways to go about Ideation process:

1. Read rules and regulations of the event and properly tabulate all the important things
2. If it’s a theme based competition, discuss with your team and go ahead with one theme in which you have some knowledge or feel comfortable talking about it.
3. Create list of all the ideas which comes to floor during brainstorming with your team.

Pro Tip: Search online and check various submissions and innovative ideas; it’s highly unlikely that something may click to you which is a combination of some really cool stuff

1. Choose top 3 best ideas and now start preparing concept note. Once you are done with it, Prepare a one slider for technical implementation.

Pro Tip: Take advice of your seniors or mentors in validation of your technical implementation idea. Sometimes some ideas can be a bit superficial and imposable to implement.

1. Finalize your idea and turn your one-page concept note into a proper project document which has all the typical project document contents
2. Create your first 10 Slider presentation for your idea along with a design document containing architecture and step wise implementation steps/

Implementation:

1. If you have followed all the steps of Ideation and Planning, It will be a very easy and straight forward process in terms of giving shape to your idea. Take help of seniors and experts as and when you get stuck. Don't try to find solution to each and every problem. As I am a firm believer of component based Software Engineering, I suggest trying out the already developed libraries and solutions. 

Pro Tip: Try to get final output as soon as possible, Don't bother about UI and Design way too much over here. You can always showcase the planned UI and UX in concept note document or in the presentation video. 

Packaging and Presentation:

1. Its very critical that before the final submission, your presentation does justice to your idea and your grand thoughts. Always make sure that you send the right message to judges. Use images as much as you canand try to show live demo during recording video. 

So - Until next time, That's all from my end. Looking forward for your tweets with comments and suggestions at https://twitter.com/NowayheCodes :)