Imagine Cup Canada 2013 – We have a winner!

The Imagine Cup is about giving students with great ideas a chance to shine! Meet the winner of the 2013 Canadian Imagine Cup who will represent us at world finals in St Petersburg Russia!

The Imagine Cup challenges students to use technology to do amazing things! This year there were three categories in the Canadian Imagine Cup Finals:

• Games – always interesting in Canada given our thriving community of game developers
• Innovation – somewhere out there is a student with a brilliant idea that could change an industry
• World Citizenship – using the technology we have available today to help others

The judges had a difficult task, review the best entry in each category and select one team to represent Canada at the world Imagine Cup finals in Russia this July. This task was made even more difficult by the caliber of the entries. Each team had already won a great Windows 8 phone from our sponsors HTC (check out the sleek HTC 8X) by taking first place in their respective categories.

The Contenders

The top games entry was a fun Windows Phone Game called Grumpy Tree. Mother Nature is tired of doing all the work to save the environment and has given up. You have to help the animals complete different tasks to help save the earth. The game has attractive graphics, lots of levels with different challenges, and great gameplay! Developed by team Greensource made up of students from Carleton University and University of Ottawa. I hope they put it in the store soon so you can download and play it yourself!

The top Innovation entry was a new twist on  the app to help you plan your shopping trip called YouSave. You chose the priority: environment, time, price? You enter your shopping list, the app compares prices, routes, and locations of stores and makes suggestions on where you should shop. This app was developed by a team from the University of Calgary

The top World Citizenship entry helps you stay healthy with Sano. Sano is a Kinect system that can either be used by physiotherapists to assign and track completion of exercises remotely, or can be used to give all of us who spend long days sitting in front of a computer simple exercises to complete to improve our health.

and the winner is…

Team Sano!

Omar Zaarour, Omar Addam, Tamer Jarada, Fatemeh Keshavarz from the University of Calgary along with their mentor Reda Alhajj, a professor at the University of Calgary, will all be flying to St Petersburg in July for the world Imagine Cup Finals.

What impressed the judges about Team Sano’s entry was not just what it can do right now, but also it’s future potential. Team Sano not only built an application using Kinect that can be used to review and track exercises, they also built a second application which can be used by physiotherapists or other health or fitness professionals to create and assign exercises. Admit it, when you have physio exercises you are diligent for the first few days, but then you start to forget. Imagine if your physiotherapist knew exactly how often you had completed your exercises and whether you had done them correctly! Imagine your mom being able to assign the kids 20 jumping jacks if they want to keep their video game privileges. 

See the entries and the keynotes online

Instead of describing the application, why don’t you see the applications in action, presented by the teams from the finals! You can view all the presentations from the Imagine Cup online here! (You will need to specify an email address and create a password to access the content). You can see the team presentations and more!

• Microsoft Canada president Max Long talks about the importance of Imagine Cup!
• Bryan Griffiths of Phantom Compass gives us a sneak peek into the mind and lair of a professional game developer and some insights on where game designers can find inspiration.
• Careerify CEO Harpaul Sambhi describes Homer Simpson as the ultimate entrepreneur
• Michael Furdyk, co-founder of Taking IT Global, a worldwide non profit with over 400,000 members talk about how his path from starting a business in high school, to the Oprah Winfrey show, to helping youth succeed around the world with Taking IT Global.
• Meet our amazing panel of judges in the Imagine Cup Kick-off: Bill Buxton advocate for innovation and design and principal researcher at Microsoft Research, Bruce Firestone entrepreneur and founder of the Ottawa Senators, Bryan Griffiths professional game developer at Phantom Compass , and Etienne Tremblay former worldwide Imagine Cup Finals judge and associate director and leader of excellence in charge of the Microsoft technologies center at Fujitsu Canada.
• And of course you can watch the presentations by each of our amazing teams!

Good luck in St Petersburg, Team Sano!

Congratulations team Greensource and team YouSave for winning the Gaming and Innovation categories!

Congratulations to all the competitors who entered Imagine Cup 2013 you did amazing work! Canada truly is a center of talent and innovation! You have great ideas, bring them to life! Remember, at Imagine Cup All dreams are welcome!