Microsoft Pakistan announced the Pakistan winners of Imagine Cup 2020 at Pak-China Friendship Center, Islamabad.
Imagine Cup is a Global competition for students aged 16+. For nearly two decades, students from around the world have participated in Microsoft’s global technology competition to bring their unique tech solutions to life.
Microsoft Pakistan continues to promote innovation among students and enables them to transform their ambitions into reality during the Imagine Cup 2020 competition.
Team from NUST name Flowlines their idea to use augmented reality to connect it’s users with the physical world was the winner of The Imagine Cup among 60 finalist teams from across the country.
Chairman HEC Dr Tariq Banuri said while congratulating the winners of this year’s national finals that “Imagine Cup is all about innovation, transformation and what comes next. Imagine cup continues to cultivate a spirit of social and technological entrepreneurship, empowering students to use their creativity to address real societal problems through technology. We have seen extremely innovative ideas coming in and the students who have been participating especially in the imagine cup and so many of them have gone on to establish their own startups that are now becoming multimillion dollar companies. I am proud of our students for participating in this Global event and I am sure they will bring laurels for Pakistan”.
The team will now represent Pakistan at the upcoming regional semifinals in Amsterdam, Holland,to compete among global teams for over USD20,000 total in prizing, Azure credits, plus the top two will win spots to advance to the 2020 Imagine Cup World Championship! During their Regional Final journey, teams will also have the chance to participate in an Entrepreneurship Day from the U.S. Department of Global Innovation through Science and Technology (GIST) to refine their business pitches, receive mentorship from Microsoft experts, and experience cutting-edge technical innovation at Microsoft Ignite the Tour. Also traveling to Amsterdam with the Imagine Cup team will be the Microsoft Student Partner(MSP) , Yaqoob Jamal from NUST, to take part in MSP summit where he will join other MSPs from the region to talk about various aspects of technology and how these programs can be incorporated in Universities.
Microsoft Pakistan & HEC reached out to more than 100 campuses this year through multiple outreach campaigns in a bid to create awareness around the competition and effectively market it to the audience, which resulted in record breaking project entries (600+)in this competition, almost double the number from 2019.
HEC’s commitment to the academia and students is reflected as Microsoft drives the Imagine Cup to highlight Pakistan’s position on the leader boards – Thus, Pakistan ranks as the top country in the World, with the highest number of project submissions and competitors in Imagine Cup. A lot of remote and underprivileged areas weretar geted specifically in the drive for Imagine Cup, particularly Hyderabad,Jamshoro, Sukkur and Quetta. Students were initially evaluated in Regional finals, held in different cities and the best teams competed to win the National Finals.
The winning teams showcased their innovative thinking, technical skills and ground-breaking solutions to address everyday challenges.
Country Manager Microsoft Pakistan Shahzad Khan said “The talent we have in Pakistan is phenomenal and competitions like Imagine Cup only help to highlight this raw talent and give them a platform to reach the global community. Our focus should be to produce skillful, technically enabled and certified graduates to meet the global market needs for engineering talent”.