MANILA, Philippines - The Philippine team dubbed "Team By Implication" emerged as the top winner in this year's Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals (Game Design Category) held in Warsaw, Poland.

The team won the award for Wildfire, the game they created which challenges players to battle poverty, gender inequality and environmental degradation, and save the world through social action and volunteerism.

Team By Implication wins the Imagine Cup for game design: (L-R): Rodrick Tan, Levi Russell Tan-Ong, Wilhansen Li, and Philip Cheang. Credit: Microsoft Philippines

“After the havoc wreaked by Typhoon Ketsana [called 'Ondoy' in the Philipppines], we saw that Filipinos responded immediately and actively to disaster efforts. We were moved by this and Wildfire demonstrates the amazing things people can achieve when and if they work together,” said team member Philip Cheang.

Team By Implication has for its members students from the Ateneo de Manila University and the University of the Philippines.

“We at Microsoft Philippines are very proud of Team By Implication and we congratulate them on this big achievement. Among entries from the top game design teams worldwide, including Belgium and France, Wildfire was acknowledged as the most ingenious, promising, and well-designed game,” said Tim Vergel de Dios, Academic Developer Evangelist of Microsoft Philippines. “Their victory shows the innovative minds of the Filipino youth and their great potential to help solve real-world problems, with the help of technology.”

According to Cheang, competing at the Imagine Cup was an experience the team will never forget. “We are honored to represent the country in the Imagine Cup. Competing with the best design and developer teams from other countries opened our eyes to the many ways we can apply technology to encourage social action,” he said.

The Imagine Cup is the world’s premiere student technology competition which gathers the best developers around the world and harnesses the creative minds of the youth to address problems faced by the world today using the power of information technology.

Student teams had to compete in five categories: Software Design, Embedded Development, Game Design, IT Challenge, and Digital Media.

In this year's Imagine Cup, the largest one to date, about 400 students from around the world joined the competition. All finalists received a Windows Phone 7 device.

“The solutions presented by our teams demonstrate how technology can transform education, the way people think, work and act. We’re very happy to show the world that Filipinos are capable of bringing about change through innovation,” said Vergel de Dios.

Other winners

In the Game Design category, runners-up were team NomNom Productions from Belgium and Gears Studio from France.

For the Software Design category, Thailand bagged the first place, followed by Serbia and New Zealand.

In the Embedded Development contest, Taiwan, Russia and France won first, second and third respectively.

In the IT Challenge category, first place went to China, second place went to Bolivia, and third place went to Singapore.

Lastly, in the Digital Media category, Taiwan was declared the winner, followed by Saudi Arabia and Singapore.

The Imagine Cup also gave out 6 achievement awards, with winners getting a cash prize of $90,000 and a trip to Poland.

Here are the winners of the achievement awards:

Envisioning 2020 Award: Taiwan, first; India, second and third. The award recognizes students' vision of how technology could transform people's lives by 2020.

Interoperability Award: Jamaica, first; Brazil, second; and Indonesia, third. The award is given to the team that develops a software application that best bridges Microsoft technologies with other technology platforms to connect data and systems.

Next Generation Web Award: Korea, first; Poland, second; Brazil, third. The award singles out the best teams who write open source Web applications using modern technologies, such as Silverlight or ASP.NET, on the Microsoft Web Platform.

Touch and Tablet Accessibility Award: Two teams from United States won this award. Contenders had to create a new education application that uses Touch and Tablet technology while expanding the possibilities on how users interact with computers.

Windows Phone 7 “Rockstar” Award: United States, first; Indonesia, second; Malaysia, third. This award challenged teams to create a Windows Phone 7 application in either Silverlight or XNA Framework that was original, visually compelling and appealing to the average consumer and that used mobile-oriented features.

Windows Internet Explorer 8 Award: Poland, Brazil, and Russia won for their software applications that provided an enhanced user experience by leveraging Web Slices, Accelerators and Search Providers in Internet Explorer.

The Imagine Cup 2011 Worldwide Finals will be held in New York City.

For more information on next year's contest, log on to http://www.imaginecup.com.