There have been great successes with college-level competitions both in China and India, so following along in this great tradition, Intel, along with Cornell University, brings us the Cornell Cup USA.
The Cornell Cup USA, presented by Intel
The Cornell Cup USA, presented by Intel, is a college-level embedded design competition created to empower student teams to become the inventors of the newest innovative applications of embedded technology. The inaugural competition will be held in May 2012 at Walt Disney World and will give teams the opportunity to win up to $10,000.
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How to get an Atom development board to use …
Development boards for your competition entry are available from your college professor, or, after October 15, 2011 may be purchased from this website.
Team Info
Welcome to the Cornell Cup USA, presented by Intel. This is your main hub for all of the information you need to develop your application and final submission to the competition. Here you can create your team by going to the team application page and learn more about the application process (see below). The timeline gives you dates for live online Q&A sessions and be sure to read the competition’s official rules page. Information about the final submissions to the competition can also be found on the submission page.
The resources page offers downloads on the competition components and their judging criteria as well as guides on how to effectively develop your project. Finally the FAQ question answer questions that came up in live online Q&A sessions as well as from emails from people like you to cornellcupusa@cornell.edu.
On this page you can read about what you can build, what makes a project “the best”, and how the competition developed the application review criteria.
Don’t forget to check out important links like:
- The resources page where you can get a copy of the application questions and pledge.
- The About for Students page (or About for Faculty page) where you can also find out more about the competition’s design and What You Can Win, even for being selected as a finalist! (Did we mention its being held at Walt Disney World?)
- Also be sure to check out the page for all of the official rules, including application submission and formatting requirements
- And to help you make your application be its best, check out the resources page, where you can also find out details about the final competition.
What Can I Build:
Nearly anything you can imagine that incorporates an innovative use of embedded systems and you can find a way that it fits within this year’s theme: Ideas could include intelligent home appliances, radar imaging systems, in-store sale and inventory systems, efficient digital storage systems, the newest toy or form of home entertainment, health monitoring system, environmental waste scrubbers, robotics, security systems, educational electronics toolkit, building energy systems, manufacturing inspection, ice cream taster, intelligent transportation systems, and everything else in between. It’s not necessarily the project that is the best idea that will win but it is the project that is “done the best” that will win the grand prize.
What Is A Project That Is “Done The Best”:
The best projects are the ones that can identify and realize a solution that most effectively and efficiently meets a specific challenge’s needs. This application process was designed to help you demonstrate that:
- You understand your challenge and its needs well.
- You have well defined solution concept that can meet those needs.
- You have ways for demonstrating and measuring how well your solution meets those needs.
- You have a well thought out plan for making your solution a reality.
- You have taken the time to think about your solution’s implementation to ensure that the underlying principles are achievable and realistic given the resources you have available.
- You have considered potential problems that could occur from both the design concept and during the development such that in the end you will still be able to deliver as complete and robust a product as possible to within the scope of your proposed solution.
The greatest projects are not the ones that always achieve the “flashiest” results, the greatest projects are the ones who make the best use of their time and resources to meet a specific need.
Be sure to check out the “About the Application” section on the About for Students page.
Review Criteria:
Significant efforts have been made to make the judging as fair as possible and all of the review criteria is available for download here. This matrix is the same exact one used by the judging reviewers. The first sheet in the Excel document offers a summary of the overall categories and their weights (or importance), and the next sheet offers a breakdown of the categories that the applications will be reviewed on. The later sheets (aka tabs) in the same Excel document, offer rubrics that specify what criteria must be met in order for an application to receive a certain score in each category and to act as a guide for both the reviewers and you in developing your application.
Before you submit your application ask your advisor, your teammates, even your friends, and most importantly yourself to evaluate your application on this rubric. When you complete the rubric be sure to mention the positives as well as the negatives. It’s important to recognize why something works so that you don’t lose those positives as you work to improve upon the negatives. We can’t wait to see what you can do.
For fairness and consistency, all reviews are also done “blind”. This means that reviewers are not aware of the names of the any of the students, faculty, schools, team names, etc for a given application. In order to keep in this spirit of fairness we ask that you try to not specifically mention any of these identifiers in your application. If a reviewer recognizes your work or may feel there is a conflict of interest, that reviewer’s feedback may be discounted from your total assessment or another reviewer may be assigned instead.
