Imagine Cup Day 3 and 4 – The Competition

Day 3 started early. Most of the Canadians were up bright and early after our late night, including me, of course 🙂 All the teams went on a tour of Foz do Iguacu (the falls). These were really impressive. Bigger, by far, than Niagara. Very beautiful, and well preserved: there are very few buildings around unlike Niagara. Our tour guide, Luciano, was very entertaining, great sense of humour. We see him tomorrow, Day 5, for a boat tour as well.

It Starts…

When we got back from the falls, we had a giant Kool-Aid binge session from the organizers at Microsoft. They said we were all family and we´re all winners; eye-rolling stuff, but necessary. Then we had lunch and a quick briefing on the format for the competition. After that we all had naps or something. It seems so far away but it was only a day ago. After a break, we got down to practicing our Lightning Round presentation, a 10-minute presentation that describes the application at a high level. We had our MS ADE (not sure what that stands for), Ben Watson, help us with some pointers. Mike, our presenter, did a few practice rounds, and we were ready to go. We presented twice to two different sets of judges, because of the format for the competition. The first time we presented, one of the judges slept through the whole thing. We asked around afterwards, and it turns out he was sleeping for a lot of them. Other than that the judges looked totally bored with the presentations; I don´t think it was because we gave a boring presentation either. Mike delivered the presentation very well. My guess is jet lag and seeing so many of them without relent.

The second one went even better. Mike was excellent, and the judges were awake, but still looked bored. The Lightning Round wasn´t scored, and only served as an intro to the application. In between the two presentations, we worked on our main demo, the scored demo on Day 4, with Ben and worked out the main format. Then we had a late dinner, and a showing of the movies for the Rendering and Short Film competitions. They were a lot of fun, and very good. Canada has an entry in the Short Film competition as well. After that was over, we went to our room to practice the demo and finalize the format. We were getting snappy at each other because of the stress. We really had to work hard to get it into the time we were given, 15 minutes. We finally got there around one in the morning and quickly went to sleep 

Day 4 – The main competition

Another early start; this time, because we were presenting at 830. We got all setup at our booth around 7am and waited. Then 830 rolled around we presented to our judges. This went really smoothly. We answered the questions they gave us really well. The demos all worked. I thought we did a great job.

After that, we all went to have some much-needed naps 🙂 After lunch we presented again to the other judges for a wildcard spot (explaining the format of the competition is too much typing 🙂 I´m sure you can find it on the web.) This one didn´t go very good. And I´m the grade-A moron that was responsible. We had a prepared tournament to present with and so I had to open it to show scheduling. But then I got an unexpected error. Uh oh. So I closed down and tried again. Error. Gasp. Read the error this time. For the first part of the demo, I created a tournament with a name that I had already used. The Open Tournament dialog couldn´t handle it. Shit. I couldn´t show the scheduler this way. Tyler was pretty sharp and started talking about some more features for the web, while Mike and I tried to fix it. What a dummy, I was thinking to myself. We couldn´t delete the tournament from the database (it´s really constrained). Damn. How do I get it to work? Aha. I can rename it in the database and it´ll be fine. The rest of the presentation went on while I did the fix. So the order got screwed up and we lost about 45 seconds while I tried to fix it, but the judges all had poker faces, so I don´t know how much it cost us. We fielded the questions really well, though. I still feel really stupid, but things happen. Everyone else said it wasn´t a big deal, but I still hate screwing up like that. I hope it doesn´t jeopardize us going onward, if we would have been chosen otherwise.

After that, we got to go shopping at some tourist shop. Lots of hand-crafted things that were a lot of money. I managed to find some cool things for the family, though. Our team was the only one allowed to do this, too. It was kind of a covert thing. The organizers are really worried about us getting stabbed or something. They sent along one of the logistics people to translate for us and advise us. He was grateful too, since he didn´t have to deal with the hassles of the tournament for an hour and a half.

Now, I´m waiting for them to announce the finalists. They announce the twelve finalists in about an hour from now. If we are chosen, we present once more after dinner to yet more judges that we have not seen before. The winner is announced on the 6th of July in Sao Paulo. So after tonight, there is no more competition. Wish us luck.