Neville Lahiru
The latest edition of the Microsoft Imagine Cup recently came to a close at the Microsoft Build conference 2022. This year’s competition saw three finalists take the stage to win the grand prize. Among them was Nana Shilpa, the Sri Lankan team from SLIIT that represented Asia. Although Saudi Arabia’s V Bionic team was crowned world champions, Nana Shilpa has come out of a successful run at the popular annual competition.
Applicants from over 160 countries registered for Imagine Cup 2022, out of which 48 teams progressed to the world finals. By late March, these teams were then shortlisted to 12, selecting the top team of the region out of Education, Earth, Healthcare, and Lifestyle categories. Following this, three teams advanced to the world championship stage, which included the Lankan team. Nana Shilpa came through as the winner from the Asian region under the Education category.
The Nana Shilpa of it all
So what’s Nana Shilpa? It’s a mobile app that’s built for screening and refining dyscalculia and dysgraphia learning disabilities among primary school students in Sri Lanka. For those wondering, dyscalculia refers to a learning disability that affects an individual’s ability to perform arithmetic functions whereas dysgraphia pertains to similar difficulties with writing.
The Nana Shilpa app is based in Sinhala and takes into account four variants of dyscalculia and dysgraphia conditions. Utilizing machine learning and deep learning, the app attempts to predict the risk of dyscalculia and dysgraphia in students. Should any student be screened to potentially be at risk of the conditions, Nana Shilpa would offer “refinement activities in the multi-sensory environment to improve the condition.”
Learning disabilities among students have been a major concern in the education sector in many countries including Sri Lanka. As of 2019, nearly 3% of the Sri Lankan population suffers from a learning disability. That’s roughly 654,000.
More to come
Speaking about the Nana Shilpa team’s journey through Imagine Cup, Thilanka Abeywardena, Chief Marketing and Business Operations Lead at Microsoft SEA, stated that the team will be getting assistance from Microsoft to build the idea further. So far, Nana Shilpa has been awarded USD 5,000 in cash and USD 5,000 in Azure credits as a finalist at the world championship stage. Interestingly as the team denotes, Azure services like Machine Learning Studio and Azure Kubernetes services have been a critical component of the app’s technical success as per the team.
Of course, this isn’t the first time Sri Lanka made headlines at the Imagine Cup arena and it likely won’t be the last. The competition marks an important Microsoft event in the student calendar, especially in Sri Lanka. Regardless, it will be interesting to see how team Nana Shilpa moves forward with their solution following the Imagine Cup success.
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