China team helps improve education for the blind

Everything that the world may become someday lies in the hands of young people today. As they look at the road ahead, their close relationship with technology enables them to dream in ways we never have before. Put the two together, and you have young minds holding the tools that can make their vision a reality.

This is the recipe that inspired Microsoft Corp. to create the Imagine Cup Student Competition. The contest encourages young people to apply their imagination, passion and technology innovations to make a difference in the world today. Now in its eighth year, the Imagine Cup has grown to be a global competition focused on finding solutions to real world issues. These challenges are tied in with the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. They seek to address issues like hunger, education, child mortality, gender equality, maternal health, HIV/AIDS and malaria, environmental sustainability and a global partnership. The teams can address any of these challenges by competing in any of the competition's four categories: Software Design, Game Design, Digital Media and IT Challenge.

With Imagine Cup 2009 theme "Imagine a world where technology solves the world's toughest problems," the Embedded Development category challenged the students to develop their own embedded device that will help solve world's toughest problems. It challenges students to go beyond the PC desktop and work with both hardware and software to build an embedded solution using Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2 and the provided embedded platform.

The iSee team from China, took the second place in the Embedded Development invitational. The group developed a low-cost embedded solution to help over 3.7 million blind people world over to improve their education, access to more information and eventually achieve a better life.

Members Xuan Zhang, Xiudong Tang, Biao Mao and Hao Peng are members of the Electrical and Electronics Innovation Center of Science & Technology of Huazhong University of Science and Technology. The four have different and complementary specialties, such as hardware design, software design and project management.