Microsoft’s Imagine Cup is an annual competition open to students around the world; challenging them to create projects for either games, world citizenship or innovation. The games category will now include a grand prize of attending the two-day PAX Dev game development conference and the opportunity to demo the game at the four day PAX Prime event.
PAX, which is short for the Penny Arcade Expo, began life as a gathering of fans of the webcomic; but has now expanded to become one of the world’s largest gaming conventions in the world with three events on two continents.
The PAX festivals have long been a powerful champion for independent game developers, notes PAX Show Director Robert Khoo. “Whether it’s learning and collaborating with other creators at PAX Dev or showing their work to the tens of thousands of gamers at PAX Prime, we’ll always jump at opportunities to support student developers in the indie gaming community who bring new ideas to the gaming world.”
Winners of the innovation and world citizenship categories will be sent to the Microsoft Ventures accelerator program and join Microsoft YouthSpark Boot Camp respectively. Each of the three categories also carries a cash prize of US$50,000.
[source: Imagine Cup]
