Title:
Students Compete to Find Tech Solutions for World
Problems
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Technology Report.
See text below
Text:
Hundreds of students from around the world recently
gathered in New York City for the Microsoft Imagine
Cup finals. They came to present their ideas for
using technology to solve world problems. Microsoft
education director Suzi Levine says the
nine-year-old program began mainly as a competition
to create technology. She says, "When we realized
that students really actually want to have a purpose
for what they're creating, we introduced the idea of
inspiring them with the UN Millennium Development
Goals and suggesting that they use those for their
muse." New sources for ideas this year included
intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations
and nonprofits. They can submit some of the
technical challenges that they would like students
to consider for their solutions.Microsoft says over
three hundred fifty thousand high school and college
students registered for this year's competition.
Judges chose more than four hundred of them to
attend the finals. Ms. Levine says several teams
were inspired by current events, including floods
last year in Thailand. A team from Chulalongkorn
University in Thailand "created a Windows Phone 7
application that allows you to broadcast your
location to your social network of friends so that
you can be more easily rescued." There were also
ideas from Egypt inspired by the revolution that
overthrew president Hosni Mubarak in February. Ms.
Levine says one idea "was to use Bluetooth as sort
of a Twitter equivalent so that if the government
shuts down the Internet, you actually can still have
a massive social distribution."Students competed in
nine categories. For example, in software design the
top prize of twenty-five thousand dollars went to
Team Hermes from Ireland. The students developed a
device for cars to collect information on road
conditions, driving behavior and traffic incidents.
A team from Taiwan's National Tsing Hua University
won first place in the embedded development
category. They developed a network of wireless
devices to help plot the safest escape routes during
a fire. Next year's awards ceremony will take place
in Australia. Microsoft has also announced a three
million dollar program to help Imagine Cup winners
further develop their projects.For VOA Special
English, I'm Carolyn Presutti. You can get more
technology news and learn English on your computer
or mobile device at voaspecialenglish.com.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
