Ecuador at the Imagine Cup 2005 Japan finals. Day Two.
After yesterday's test presentations, Team Ecuador hammered it hard to be ready for the real thing:
As you can see, the teams basically cleared the premises from every non illegal drink (available for free and in seemingly unendable quantities). It goes without saying that not everyone follows the standard way of getting ready:
Team Ecuador had its first presentation at noon and we were already getting nervous because they didn't show by the booths. Alas, it became clear that what they were doing is ironing out every other aspect:
The good thing of arriving in the last hour is that you don't have to wait outside too long, so after Team USA finished their thing, Team Ecuador stepped on stage to get everything ready in front of the judges:
As a matter of fact, there were some glitches with the audio and video connections, but as this wasn't part of the grading, this wasn't a problem (expect for the mounting stress, of course). And then the first real 25 minutes started:
The explanation of the technical details of the project happened to be, in my extra-oficial opinion, a strong point of Team Ecuador and, as you can see, there were no lack of questioning (in English of course, don't forget that most of the teams at Imagine Cup are *not* native English speakers). The other strong point was the live demo which included the update of a database in Quito (from Yokohama at midnight) and getting back a message on a Japanese cell phone that the team rented when they arrived to Narita. Even though a lot of things could go wrong, the demo went smoothly:
The final questions of the judged pressed on security (how to protect grades sent over the Internet?) and innovation (this kind of stuff is new in Latin America but not so much in other parts of the world). At last, the 25 minutes were over and the kids could relax for a few hours, I killed time in several ways, for example watching the Visual Gaming finals:
Project Hoshimi is a game in which Dr. Hoshimi innoculates himself a virus and the competitors must build nanobots (actually .NET classes) to search and destroy the virus, the "gaming field" was a special framework developed in .NET in which the competitors assemblies are loaded. Hoshimi is a strategy game that requires deep knowledge of .NET and AI. There were a high school category (some of the competitors are very young and came with their parents from places like Serbia and China) and an open category. Some of the things I saw will mold my game development webcast series that I'll be doing in August. But I digress, again. After some 6 hours, the time was close to the second graded presentation and the team used every minute:
Remind, rehearse, image what are you going to say and how. At long last, they went on stage for their last presentation for the second group of judges. The view from the team's perspective was more or less like this:
As you can see the judges (from Japan, Mexico, and Australia in this case) took their jobs very seriously. This time the initial preparations went smoothly but the demo did have problems:
So the team scrambled as the 25 minutes were running up. In the end, the judges pretty much questioned the same topics of security and innovation as the first group of judges did and, after the final remarks, the work was over, now all is left is to wait for one day before knowing the 6 runners-up from the 37 teams. Leandro y Sergio suggested that we take the guys and gals from Latino teams out to some place to kill the stress but coming back to normal behavior could be hard:
What else could I say? what could've been done different? was the Japanese judge happy with my answer? But one good thing about young people is that they can leave things behind so, bit by bit, in Yokohama Hard Rock Cafe the teams started to do some group therapy:
Here Leonardo pays attention to how things went for a friend of a Mexican team, specifically from Tijuana (to the best of my knowledge, Mexico had 3 teams at Imagine Cup: Puerto Vallarta - Short Film, Tijuana - Software Design, DF - IT, but I could be wrong). After a few hours of laughter between Mexicans, Costarricans, Peruvians, Ecuadorians and Portorricans), Team Ecuador said good night in a notable more relaxed and intercultural mood:
Now to wait all day tomorrow, which is basically a free day and at night to the dinner where the runner-ups will be announced. We'll see.