Ideathon creates all time high Imagine Cup 2022 Excitement among students in Kathmandu!

With an aim to drive Imagine Cup 2022 registration, Microsoft technical communities in Kathmandu organized Imagine Cup 2022 Ideathon for all those interested to participate in Imagine Cup this year. Nearly 180+ university students coming in 90+ business, IT & engineering colleges of Kathmandu participated in the bootcamp.

The event was led by Pradeep Kandel, Microsoft Azure MVP & Executive President of Nepal Cloud Professionals community- an official chapter of Microsoft Azure communities in Nepal.

Ideathon is a bootcamp where you will have a chance to find mentors, team, people with similar mindset as you and can learn idea brainstorming along with other amazing workshops by experts from industry. You will have a chance to create your own team, share ideas and select a mentor of your choice. These teams with the guidance of mentor can now participate in Imagine Cup.

As the event unfolded, Sagar Uprety, the Emcee of the event who is also a Microsoft Learn Student Ambassador at Kathmandu University called upon Deependra Bajracharya, Account Executive, WW Inside Sales, Microsoft to kick off the event with an opening remark on Imagine Cup locally & globally & why Ideathon today. Later, the stage was shared by Subash Manandhar, Partner Sales Executive, SEA New Market, Microsoft who spoke around Microsoft Ecosystem in Nepal.

The next session was about the experience sharing from the former Imagine Cup winners: Shishir Shrestha, Avinash Gyawali, Melisha Ghimire and Awan Shrestha. The champions talked about their success and failure stories and how they reached the pinnacle of success. They also encouraged the participants to have ideas that solved problems to make an impact on the world and use those technologies that might be useful for the future and make you stand out from all the rest.

The next session was a dial in presentation via Microsoft Teams by Prabhath Mannapperuma, Partner Technology Strategist, Microsoft Sri Lanka around Imagine Cup tips and tricks. Special thanks to Prabhath for joining online and helping participants to better prepare for Imagine Cup project submissions- this was the only session that was presented remotely.

The next session was once again with Pradeep Kandel. As an Azure MVP, Pradeep took over the stage and talked about how students could leverage Azure and plug in various Azure Components and Services such as Azure Virtual Machine, App Services, Azure Functions, Cognitive Services into their solutions to make them smart and intelligent.

After light refreshment and group pictures, the session progressed with the core part of the event- that is brainstorming session with design thinking principle followed by idea pitching session. The session was led by Nishan Aryal (CEO, Innovation Lab), Melisha Ghimire (Managing Director, Girls in Tech Nepal) and Eeda Rijal (CEO, SochWare).

After the idea pitching was over, Sambhav Bhurtel, Gold MLSA along with Laxman Pokhrel fellow MLSA & the entire MLSA Team joined stage where in Sambhav spoke about Microsoft Learn Student Ambassador Program who basically represent Microsoft on-campus and can be found actively running Microsoft events and hackathons.

The sessions were facilitated by 4 Microsoft MVPs, 25+ Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors, and Subject Matter Experts from various professional bodies. Students were briefed about how ideas can be generated.

Finally, Sagar called upon Pradeep Kandel on stage again who extended vote of thanks to entire partners, and everyone involved in making the event successful. Vote of appreciation goes to Nepal Cloud Professionals, Girls in Tech, Microsoft MVP Community, Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors Community, MIE Experts; venue partner- Softwarica College of IT & Ecommerce; media partners- TechPana, TechSathi, ICT Frame as well as outreach partners- CSIT Association of Nepal (CSITAN) and NxtGen.