Mandeville, Jamaica…[Rhoma Thomlinson/NCU/IAD]
For the second year in a row, Northern Caribbean University’s Information Science students have been chosen to represent Jamaica in the second round of the International Microsoft “Image Cup” competition. The Adventist institution’s Imagine Cup Team was the only team chosen to represent the island.
Last year, the all-male team from NCU not only represented Jamaica, but the entire region in Japan, after being crowned regional champions in the global competition. It was the first time that NCU and Jamaica were entering the prestigious technology-based Microsoft competition.
The move to the second round means the team will compete against seven teams from across the Caribbean and Central America. From there, a regional champion will be crowned.
Project Advisor and Chair of the Information Science department at NCU, Kenrie Hylton, said the NCU team will be competing against teams from Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Panama, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.
He said the team members this year were “really excited” when they heard they had advanced to the second round.
“There was a lot of competition. They are really excited about it,” he said. He said that during the second phase of the competition only three teams will be chosen and he is confident the NCU team will be one of them.
The theme for this year’s competition is “Imagine a world where technology helps us to live healthier lives”. Mr Hylton said while he can’t go into the details of the NCU entry, “it is guided by the writings of Ellen G. White (Prolific eighteenth century author) on health and we hope to bring that across to the rest of the world”. Hylton said the project, code-named NUEGEN, “will help people to make life changes that will eventually lead them to live healthier and longer.”
“As a University, I want NCU to be outstanding for its teaching in computer studies technology,” Hylton said of his dream for NCU. “Not only that, I want people in and out of Jamaica to begin to look to this country as a great source of technology.”
Owned and operated by the West Indies Union of Seventh-day Adventists, Northern Caribbean University (formerly West Indies College) was founded in 1919, and is the oldest private tertiary institution in Jamaica. NCU is a private, four-year, co-educational, liberal-arts institution, offering a number of professional, pre-professional and vocational programs and is the only multi-disciplinary tertiary institution serving rural Jamaica. Its enrollment exceeds 4,500 students from over 35 countries.
