I was a judge at the Imagine Cup and I must confess that i was extremely disappointed. The eventual winner was a contestant from Ethiopia that developed a heart monitoring system that interfaced with hardware that connected to a patient's chest via electrodes to measure the heart rate and predict when a heart attack was imminent. It would plot the hearbeat on the wearer's phone. It would then send the location of the wearer via his phone through GPRS to the nearest hospital that would use the GPS coordinates to map out a route for the ambulance to the patient.

Contestants from Kenya i am ashamed to say were presenting Library systems and their ilk.

I was very taken aback at this disconnect.

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 12:13 PM, Walubengo J <jwalu@yahoo.com> wrote:

i agree. its not awareness...i remember pushing another similar challenge from Microsoft, "Imagine Cup 2009" at Multimedia University. It got a serious mute response...i think our students from primary school are drilled to focus on and pass exams....anything that has little or no impact on their exam tends to be neglected. We seem to have failed to cultivate a culture of intellectual "activism" in our education system. When I was growing up we used to have something called "science-congress" where all high-schools would compete from district, provincial and finally national level to show-case their innovations. Not quite sure if this still happens... walu.

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