Hello hello! I’m back from the epic week that was the Microsoft Student Partner Summit in Seattle, Washington. The week was absolutely amazing and inspiring, and packed with great presentations by Microsoft internal, incredible views into the workings of Microsoft, and mind-blowing innovations showcased for the Imagine Cup. This is the photo story of our time at Microsoft’s HQ in Redmond, Washington.

The Microsoft HQ campus is a city all on it’s own. It looks like something out of a movie, with bright green grass in between the grand buildings in which innovation thrives. There’s a sparkle in the air and an infectious energy flowing throughout Redmond, making you feel overwhelmed with drive and yet completely at home at the same time.

As part of the MSP summit, we had the awesome opportunity to explore the Imagine Cup showcase and even showcase some of our own apps as well! Here are some of the cool projects from IC2014. The two girls above invented Butterfly, a nail polish mixer that creates whatever colour you want within minutes. The machine takes colour input from RGB values and from images, so you could take a picture of your shirt or jewelry and mix nail polish to match your outfit exactly! Butterfly won the third place prize for the Innovation category, and $5000 to boost their business.

Three generations of Windows Phones! The 1520, the 920 and the 800. Below you see one of the Imagine Cup innovations, Tep, an app that directly ties the health of your virtual pet to your workouts. Earn points every time you work out, and use those points to feed your lovely pet!

Another innovation, claVision, by the Canadian Imagine Cup team, live transcribes music that you play on the piano and gives you instantly printable and playable sheet music! The app uses just a normal web cam to track your hand movements and record your music as you play. A true innovation for the world of music!

Below are two of the MSP apps that stood out to me. Similar to a weather app, Haze My lets you get the haze and smog indices for your Malaysian city. Below, Beetle accurately diagnoses plant disease by analyzing the colour of leaves, and gives you suggestions on how to cure or prevent the sickness - great for farmers with large crops!

The most visually exciting category of the Imagine Cup competition was the Games section. The overall quality and completeness of all the games was astounding, and that was reflected by the amount of traffic consistently present at their booths. Below you can see Under Bed by Korean team Bomon, a side scroller about a girl named Judy and her adventures under the bed. Underneath that is one of our MSPs playing the winning game, Turn On, by Russian game development team Brainy Studios. Turn On follows the story of a little spark trying to relight the world after it has gone dark - but Turn On is not just a normal game. The team calls it “2 and 1/2 D,” as they’ve developed it for both 2D screens and 3D virtual reality systems. In the 3D version you can look ahead and plan your route through the world.

Our time on the Microsoft campus was short but epic. Next we went to the convention center in downtown Seattle to watch the world finals of the Imagine Cup along with 5000 Microsoft employees in town for Tech Ready. With inspiring talks from Satya Nadella, Alexey Pajitnov and more, the finals were certainly not to be missed! Stay tuned for a video of the event, coming up soon!