Lagos — Three students of the University of Lagos (UNILAG) are to represent the country at the global finals of Microsoft's 'Imagine Cup' contest, scheduled to hold in Paris, France in July.

The trio of Olajide Olatunbode, Seun Adepeju and Celestine Ezeokoye, all students of computer science came first at the national finals of the competition, held at Centre for Information Technology and Systems (CITS), UNILAG, weekend. Another team of three, who are students of the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife; Babajide Tanimomo, David Jiboye and Oladipo Fasoro came second; while a lone third year student of Agriculture from the University of Ibadan, Olatubosun Olaleye, came third.

The Imagine Cup is the world's premier student technology competition, designed to encourage students and young developers to apply their imagination, passion and creativity to visualise a better world enabled by technology: It is also to bring that vision to life, building on the Microsoft platform of choice.

In his welcome address, Microsoft's Country Manager, Chinenye Mba-Uzoukwu had charged the contestants to always have a passion for what they do and an enduring commitment to themselves and the values they stand for.

Drawing an example from the life of Bill Gates, he said "remember, what you will be is determined by the vision you have, not for the world itself, but for life. Even if Nigeria laughs at you that your dream will be in vain, say you know where you are going."

The contest was launched last year with six teams participating. Ten teams registered for this year's edition which theme is 'Imagine a World Where Technology Enables a Sustainable Environment'. Seven of them participated in the finals. The teams were as innovative as they came.

The winners that went by the appellation 'Team Carburn' sought to address the problem of global warming by designing an inbuilt chip system that runs on CRL just like an internal combustion engine would. It logs the performance of the engine to a database that can be used for analyses.

Second place winner, OAU's 'Team SOW (Save Our Water)' designed a software solution that analyses water pollution data, obtained from particular sensors and predicts their impact, thus allowing people to make informed decisions about the level of purity of the water available to them. Olaleye, on the other hand designed what he called 'The Tracer Application, which, he said, addresses the challenge of the Nigerian Nuclear Regulatory Authority by providing search facility for the inventory of radioactive materials.

In what Microsoft's Ade Famoti described as the kind of partnership that the company hopes to see, a second year student of Computer Science at the University of Lagos, Yusuf Idris and final year of Computer Science at the Yaba College of Technology, Oluwatosin Alomoge came together to design the Green Alliance System (GAS), a software that takes a wide range of environmental data, from acid rain to household equipment and analyses these into useful information. Theirs emerged the most innovative entry in the competition.

Other contestants were Idara Akpan a fourth year student of Law from the University of Abuja, Izuwa Ahanor from the University of Benin and Clement Etuk from Aptech Computer Education. Famoti described them all as "excellent and very brave." Their projects were assessed on Problem definition, consistency, innovation, impact, effectiveness, user experience, complexity management, functional completeness and presentation, among others.

Head of UNILAG's Computer Science Department, Prof. Joshua Ayeni described 'Imagine Cup' as a very inviting and appropriate name. He told the students, "You are at the age when you imagine that nothing is impossible. When you can imagine it, there is a way to solve it."

Some of the partners of the programme, including Accenture, Sidmach Technologies, Signal Alliance, Allied Soft and G4V were on hand to interact with third and final year students of Computer Science, who are Second Class Upper and First Class materials.

The initiative was launched to address the real need in the market place for human resources by connecting Microsoft registered partners with universities in order to provide students with real-world experience either as interns and trainees, in the first instance or permanent staff in the long run.