Sam Stokes runs a blog around here as an Academic Developer Evangelist for Microsoft. He works with students in colleges here in Southern California to enhance the curriculum being taught for Computer Science.
One of the things he works with is the Worldwide Imagine Cup, a student contest featuring the talents of the brightest developers from each university to build a video game. The games are judged through multiple rounds and there is the potential for some nice cash rewards for the winners. Here’s his latest report:
California State University, Fullerton has the top two of three finalist for the Imagine Cup Viewers Choice, this was a game design process that was judged on technical design by judges in affiliation with Microsoft, as well as on-line students involved in the Imagine Cup! This was against a large number of schools that were in heated competition. Each team from California State University, Fullerton has a member who was an intern at Microsoft last year and both are to be hired upon graduation, but there are others on the teams as well. The student teams have expressed interest in taking their story to high schools to excite the high school students to study math and technology because these are really used in the real world of game programming. The teams will also participate in the Penny Arcade on May 2, and continue on the Imagine Cup Game Design Nationals. Fullerton will win the first ($5000), second ($2500) or third ($1000) for the various teams.
CSU Long Beach is in the top 7 US team out of 643 teams that started the competition. They will be presenting their concepts in LA later in April. If successful the team will then advance to Paris, France.
But don’t discount UCLA, although they chose to focus on refining their game design efforts, after being smacked down in the Software Design Invitational, instead of doing the Viewer’s Choice, they are still in the running. I have seen their work, and they will submit directly to the Imagine Cup, I believe that they have a good chance of beating the rest of the world. This is a risky strategy, but it does give them more time to focus on game play and design.
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, made it through the second round for the Software Design Invitational, but the team fell apart when one of the designers graduated.
All of these teams are made up of passionate students that are excited about design and writing code, as well as doing excellent software architecture and engineering.
To follow his blog, check out: http://blogs.msdn.com/devschool/
To find out more about the Imagine Cup, check out: http://imaginecup.com/About/WhatIs.aspx
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