This is the ninth year for the Imagine Cup, Microsoft's student technology competition. Teams from all over the world, representing 70 countries, have gathered this week in New York City for the Imagine Cup finals. As part of the Imagine Cup mandate, the students' projects must tackle some of the world's most pressing issues, as outlined by the United Nations' Millennium Goals. Team Dragon (U.S.) Asthma is the most common chronic illness in children. While an asthma attack is a terribly traumatic experience for kids, routine asthma care - performing regular breathing tests - can feel like a chore.



Enter Azmo the Dragon, a mobile roleplaying game that makes these daily breathing tests fun. The game connects the mobile phone to a spirometer (the device that asthma sufferers breathe into to record their lung performance). Azmo the Dragon takes a baseline of user's lung function, takes track of a patient's daily data, and as such will make it easier to tell when an asthma attack may be impending (typically asthma sufferers experience several days of declining lung function beforehand). The students who built the game attend Rice University, and at the Imagine Cup are showcasing not only their incredible game but also the spirometer hardware (developed at Rice) that is far cheaper than other apparatuses on the market. Team Note-Taker (U.S.) Arizona State University student David Hayden is legally blind, and when he enrolled in math classes, found it incredibly difficult to keep up with note-taking in the classes, so much so that he had to drop the courses.

Hayden is one of the members of Team Note-Taker, the winner of the U.S. Imagine Cup finals. The tool has a number of great features, including the ability to enhance the image (when an instructor's dry-erase marker is about to run out, for example), to swipe the video back a few frames (so a student can see the whiteboard and continue taking notes, even if the instructor has stepped in front and blocked the view), to take screenshots of the whiteboard, and to search all of this offline. Studies have shown that students learn best when they take their own notes, and Note-Taker helps give visually impaired students the ability to do just that, easily moving between the distance-reading of the whiteboard at the front of the class and the close-reading of handwritten notes.

OneBuzz's tool aggregates data from a variety of sources to help manage the supply chain for malaria medicine, not so that clinics can react to outbreaks but so they can respond in real-time and even better, actually predict them. As malaria is seasonal and cyclical, the system utilizes data from past years and past weeks in order to ascertain which clinics and which communities will need help.

Azmo the Dragon,Imagine Cup,Note-Taker,OneBuzz,Pressing Problems,Student-Built Technology,Technology