FLYING THE FLAG: Chinese students celebrate their awards at the finals of the Imagine Cup Student Competition 2008, an annual global student technology contest initiated by Microsoft in 2003

Chinese participants battled their way to glory at this year's Imagine Cup Student Competition. Their achievements, including two second-place and one third-place trophies, gave China the most awards at the annual global technology contest, initiated by Microsoft Corp. in 2003.

A total of 370 finalists, from a pool of more than 200,000 students from more than 100 countries and regions, participated in the intense weeklong Imagine Cup finals in Paris on July 4-10. Among the Chinese winners, the Wings team from Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications won second place in Embedded Development, while a second place in Project Hoshimi (Programming Battle) went to Zephyr team from Dalian Nationalities University and a third place in the IT Challenge to Liu Yan from Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

"Imagine Cup gives us a chance to show the world how Chinese students are doing in the IT field," said Guo Peng, a member of Zephyr team. "It's also a chance for us to better understand ourselves as well as the outside world."

"The competition provides a forum for students around the world to explore new ways to address some of the world's toughest challenges by taking advantage of the power of software," Nigel Burton, General Manager of Microsoft Greater China Developer & Platform Evangelism, at a recent news conference in Beijing where representatives of Chinese winners shared their experiences with the media.

This year, the Imagine Cup competition is themed as "imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment."

"Last year's theme focused on education and the year before it was health. Our topics are related to the issues that the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization pays much attention to, and we try to come up with practical solutions through technological innovation from the angle of human development," Burton said.

"The most valuable thing to me as a participant in the Imagine Cup finals is that I have had my vision greatly broadened. The international arena enables me to see clearly for the first time the differences between us and our foreign peers and the distance we are away from our dreams," said Guo Peng, a member of the Zephyr team.

During the competition, Guo made many friends. Having talked with many Russian competitors, he found the Russian students have better innovative thinking. "They have a different way of analyzing problems. They aren't puzzled by superficial things and they have the ability to get right to the core of a problem," Guo told Beijing Review.

According to Deng Xiao, a former Imagine Cup finalist and now the tutor for Chinese teams, the competition is a test of the contestants' general ability to think, reason, judge, analyze and synthesize.

"We used to think that Chinese students were good at exams but lagged behind the foreign students in practice. I should say that's a thing of the past," said Deng, who added that in the information age students around the world are starting almost from the same line. "Chinese students now are good at using their brains and hands, not just at exams."