Where Passion Meets Innovation
This year Botany Downs Secondary College hosted the Imagine Cup Junior Hackathon for selected Year 9 students on 5 April. The day long innovation challenge was facilitated by Microsoft officials.
A global student competition where young people across the world learn about AI (artificial intelligence) and invent AI ideas that could make a difference. Students from all over the world have participated in the past, and we are so excited to be on board this year! It’s where passion meets innovation.
Imagine cup is a place where great young minds come together to try and solve world problems, finding solutions via artificial intelligence. It was a really great experience where business enterprise, innovation and technology knowledge are combined to solve problems facing the world.
We had the day divided in three sessions. Session one finding a global problem to solve, second session finding the solutions using AI and last session was presentation. I hope everybody had a great time because we were one of the first school in New Zealand to do Imagine Cup Hackathon. I thought every group did a very good job and I saw they all tried their hardest. It was such an exciting event.
Thanks to the Microsoft team for flying in and teaching us about AI and what Microsoft does. They told us about all the other jobs they did before working for Microsoft, some were teachers, some were drummers. It was a fun and interesting journey for them. I hope one day in the future I can have a long and interesting journey like they had and end up at Microsoft because I want to one day work with a great company like Microsoft. The other good thing was they gave us morning tea and lunch, and a goodie bag at the end of the presentation. I bet the Microsoft team and the teachers had a really great time at the special day. Thanks to Commerce Department, Mr Sharma, Mr Whipp and the school for giving us this wonderful opportunity. Totally worth it.
~ Johan Arpin 9K12