IIT dominates Microsoft Imagine Cup Sri Lanka

The sun rises over a city of skyscrapers. A mountain breathes mist. A drone flies over a crowd of cheering geeks in Microsoft T-shirts. No, we’re not high: we were at the DHPL building in Navam Mawatha, watching a video on the highlights of the 2014 Imagine Cup.

Why were there is because of the 2015 Imagine Cup awards, which happened at 5 PM yesterday. This year’s Imagine Cup took place in three categories: Games, Innovation, and World Citizenship. Wellington Perera, the DX lead, is up on the stage, introducing this year’s Imagine Cup to the masses. Part of his speech was a video interview with Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft’s “Chief Evangelist” talking about why they have the Imagine Cup in the first place. And, surprisingly, there were some hilariously uncomfortable videos of the teams’ demo videos.

Now, a note: this was the awards ceremony. The competition itself has been happening in the background. The National Finals, where each country chooses 3 world semifinalists, is done; the world semifinals happen in May, and out of this international judging process come the winner and the rest of the pack.

GAMES

Winners – Dimension X (huge cheers there) representing IIT

Runners up – SAS Ninjas, representing the University of Moratuwa

Second runners-up –  the OOPS Creators, representing the University of Colombo

INNOVATION

Winners: Team DRUTA, again from IIT

First runner up: Team Firebird from IIT

Second runners up: Team Equinox from IIT

WORLD CITIZENSHIP

Winner: Team Firebird from IIT

First runner up: PulzSolutions from SLIIT

Second runners up: a draw from two teams from IIT – Techvision and Team Top Hills

Wellington has some judges’ feedback up on a screen. The local projects, he says, has a very high depth of knowledge in most technologies and an excellent level of completeness; however, the business side – marketing and so on – are a bit behind.

As you can see, IIT is all over the place. IIT has historically been an extremely competent university, especially at Imagine Cup; last year’s showing were nothing short of mind-blowing, and this year is right up there. But one wonders why there aren’t more teams and better ideas coming in from places like the University of Moratuwa or the University of Colombo: at this rate, you might as well rename this the IIT Awards.

Note: we were alerted by members of PulzSolutions that we had made a mistake in the article – they were quoted as being from IIT, when in reality they were SLIIT. This typo has been fixed. We apologize for this error.