Imagine Cup, organized by Microsoft, is the world\'s largest technology competition for students. Its previous editions attracted nearly 2 million students from 190 countries. In this year\'s edition, projects compete in three categories: Games, Innovation and World Citizenship.

The winning projects of the Polish edition of the Imagine Cup selected last Thursday in Warsaw have advanced to the world semi-finals. If they succeed, they will get in the finals. In addition, investors are already interested in projects with the greatest business potential participating in the competition.

"For the Ministry of Economy, it is important that you compete not only with your ideas, but also with marketing and market ideas" - Deputy Minister of Economy Arkadiusz Bąk told the contestants.

Winner in the Innovation category is the project Smart Mirrors. Young designers from Poznań and Warsaw have created a solution for motorcyclists. It allows to synchronize motorcycle mirror settings with rider\'s movements. "The faster you go, the more you have to lean on a motorcycle. The problem is that the mirrors are static and adjusted to one, usually upright position. The more you lean forward, the less you see in the mirrors" - explained in an interview with PAP one of the authors of the project, Bartosz Ambrożkiewicz, high school student at the School of Communication in Poznań. Smart Mirrors system uses information from an app on the rider’s phone and automatically adjusts the mirrors the position of the motorcyclist. The phone with the application only needs to be placed the chest pocket. The authors of the project, in addition to Ambrożkiewicz, are Aleksandra Olszewska (Collegium Da Vinci in Poznań), Michał Cwojdziński (Polish Open University in Warsaw) and Mikołaj Owczarczak (Poznań University of Technology).

In the Games category, the prize went to the team Serious English Name. Students of the University of Łódź - Bartosz Jędrasik, Renata Ciesielska, Łukasz Kraśniewski and Piotr Rachubiński developed the computer game Bandbarian. Its purpose is to motivate the player to be physically active. In order to reach the goal in the game, warrior has to become stronger. And this is possible only when the player exercises together with the warrior. The game tracks the player’s progress through a special band the player wears.

Winner in the World Citizenship category is the team Toast and Brains of Białystok University of Technology (Michał Bogucki, Krzysztof Dziemiańczuk, Michał Grześ and Marcin Joka) with their project Photon. "We have built a robot that will educate future generations - it will teach children to think logically and to introduce them to the world of new technologies and programming" - said one of the team members Marcin Joka. The robot is integrated with an application that sets increasingly difficult tasks for children (aged 7-15 years).

Rafal Albin from Microsoft Polska in an interview with PAP praised the participation of Poles in earlier world editions of Imagine Cup. "Since 2005, we have won places on the podium 23 times, 7 times we have won the first place. We have a strong tradition of proving that the Polish IT education is at a very high level. We have fantastic students, we need to teach them to earn money with their ideas" - he said.

PAP - Science and Scholarship in Poland

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