Students brace for coding competition in Cork

27 Mar 2015

More than 100 students will descend on University College Cork (UCC) to take part in a coding tournament, where a mixture of college goers and school students will team up to solve problems.

The event – the Irish Collegiate Programming Competition (IrLCPC) – is in its sixth edition and teams up third-level students with those as young as 12, testing their problem-solving skills and knowledge of algorithms and programming.

Each team has three members, with no more than two coming from a postgrad environment.

Armed with a computer and a list of problems, they go at it trying to solve it all as best they can within four hours. The difficulty level of the problems will vary from simple course work level to very challenging ACM competition level issues.

The teams each have coaches from their own institution, with those coming from the Munster Programming Training (MPT) coached by Dr Sabin Tabirca, whose aim is to train students in the areas of computer programming, web design, image production and flash design.

The prizes on offer are on the back of Google Ireland’s interest, with three teams receiving awards. James Whelton, co-founder of Code Dojo, is a previous student of MPT.

The event is being hosted by UCC’s student chapter of the association for computing machinery, in collaboration with the Insight Centre for Data Analytics. It forms part of the celebration of George Boole, which looks at the life and work of Boole who was born in 1815 and worked at UCC.

Gordon Hunt
By Gordon Hunt

Gordon Hunt joined Silicon Republic in October 2014 as a journalist. He spends most of his time avoiding conversations about music, appreciating even the least creative pun and rueing the day he panicked when meeting Paul McGrath. His favourite thing on the internet is the ‘Random Article’ link on Wikipedia.

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