Mexico: at the forefront of the technology vanguard

Last week Microsoft Mexico held the national final of Imagine Cup 2016, a competition to encourage young people from all over the world to test their technological skills.With this competition, Microsoft aims to promote the use and development of technology among the younger public.

This event is not only notable for the importance of the technology, but also for its emphasis on business.The participants are invited to develop an economically viable project that satisfies an existing need and is useful for both people and companies.

Imagine Cup is part of the Microsoft YouthSpark program, whose goal is to provide young people with opportunities in the areas of education, enterprise and employment.  The competition is divided into three categories:

- Innovation, where the prize goes to originality and the way of using technology.

- Global responsibility, applied to solving an existing problem

- Video games, which promotes an interactive experience.

The prize-winning project in the innovation category was Arkahé, a robotic arm controlled via voice commands by Kinect, a free game and entertainment controller developed by Microsoft.The goal of this project is to create an arm that can control a person through its movements, but for the device to be able to record and make the movements itself.

The winner of the global responsibility category was dEYEgnostico, an app which makes a photographic analysis of the iris to alert to which parts of the body require more attention.It also provides information and recommends what foods should be eaten to strengthen those areas.

Conttingley was the prize-winning project in video games, a two-dimensional game where the characters must reach their destination while fighting their enemies.

The participants have to use Microsoft's own tools to develop the projects.The Mexican winners now need to compete with rivals from all over the world to ensure that Mexico is also the winner in innovation.