Imagine Cup: The ADE team prepares for the event

Friday, the Academic Developer Evangelist (ADE) team meets to discuss what their roles will be over the US Imagine Cup.  This is done each year as it is critical that the students have a fantastic experience, over the years not only do students get excited, the individual ADEs get excited.  Each ADE is given specific assignments, some are assigned general tasks and others are assigned teams when one ADE has a lot of teams from their region.

The Students attending the Imagine Cup will go through a process of judging and if they miss their assigned judging because they oversleep or get lost means that the judging opportunity is lost.  So the ADEs need to make sure that the student teams know that an ADE will be there to remind them.  Also, there are technology requirements that each student team needs to make sure that they are ready to show off to the judge.

XBoxes for the game design teams need to be set-up, and ports opened so that the Xboxes can securely be connected to XBox Live.  Software design teams need make sure that they can connect to the projectors.  All of the teams need to practice their talks.

At Microsoft the Imagine Cup is job one right now.  For example, I was having a problem with my access card, which normally takes 24 hours to fix, I told the technician that I was with Imagine Cup and the problem was solved instantly.  Seriously, everyone in Redmond is excited about the Imagine Cup.  When I was getting coffee at a Tully’s outside of Microsoft in Redmond, one of the Corp VPs saw my Imagine Cup Button and came over to tell me how excited he was about the Imagine Cup!  Which freaked me out as I have a problem with talking to management, but I think it went well.