STUDENTS: Welcome to Imagine Cup 2014!

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It is my pleasure to announce the launch of our Imagine Cup 2014 season and share the news that registration is now officially open!  

This is the 12th year of Imagine Cup, Microsoft’s premier student technology competition, and we’ll be giving out more than $750,000 in prizes this year and we’ll have even more to add in the months ahead.

And of course, this year we’re bringing Imagine Cup home to Seattle for the first time ever.

Think students can’t change the world?  Just ask our chairman and co-founder, Bill Gates, about that!

Competitions

Our three main competitions are back for 2014: Games, Innovation, and World Citizenship. And once again the prizes are substantial: $50,000 to the first-place team in each competition! We had some amazing projects win these competitions at our 2013 World Finals in St. Petersburg, Russia, two months ago and we can’t wait to see what this year brings.

Challenges

This year at Imagine Cup we want to help students get their project off the ground early and with the right planning. We’re launching a new series of global online challenges inspired by the Software Development Life Cycle to help students start fast and start smart:

  • Pitch Video Challenge  (September-October 25): Record a five minute video with your team pitching your project!
  • Project Blueprint Challenge (November-December): Dig deep into your thinking and deliver a written project proposal highlighting your users, requirements, scenarios, and business model.
  • User Experience Challenge (January-February): How will people actually use your software? A great user experience transforms any solution so show us your user flow, wireframes, and a visual target for how your software will look on screen.

For each of our bi-monthly challenges, student teams can compete in Games, World Citizenship, and Innovation categories with the top team in each category winning $3,000! In addition, the top ten teams in each category will be honored as Challenge All-Stars. All of these winners will receive expert feedback on their projects and they will be celebrated on our website for the entire Imagine Cup community to congratulate.

That’s Not All

We've got a lot more goodness for student developers yet to come, including the return of our global trivia quiz, Brain Games 2.0. Subscribe to our Insiders Newsletter to get the latest news and join us on Facebook and Twitter.

Game on!