The First Year Challenge Award in Computing 2015

Middlesex University is delighted that Russell Weetch of Systematic Marketing has sponsored The First Year Challenge Award in Computing for 2015

Franco Raimondi, Associate Professor in Logic and Verification at Middlesex University is delighted that Russell Weetch of Systematic Marketing has sponsored The First Year Challenge Award in Computing for 2015, adding “this is excellent news!” At the end of their last term, First Year students of Computer Science take part in a “challenge” building robotic applications by working in group of 4 or 5 students. Students need to submit the code of their project, together with a video. The winning project is selected by a group of academics who assess originality, development skills, robustness, presentation. “The student submissions are ranked according to complexity of the project being developed, quality of code and quality of documentation and presentation video.” According to Franco.

The 2015 prize winners project, by Olegs Celinskis and Wojchiech Jan Jeziorski, was ranked first in all criteria. In terms of complexity, they had built their own robotic platform to enter the Eurobot challenge. In fact, they built two robots to perform different tasks and maximise the points they could score. In terms of quality of code, Olegs and Wojciech learned C++ autonomously and implemented a high-quality control code for the two robots. Finally, the documentation was very detailed and covers all aspects, from design to implementation to testing. The video was excellent and covered all the stages of their work.

Olegs and Wojciech reached the fourth place in the Eurobots UK finals, which included approximately 30 teams from all around the UK with students at all levels, including master students specialising in robotics!

After winning our final year challenge, Olegs and Wojciech qualified for the Eurobot finals in Switzerland, where they competed against international teams. This is the first time for a team of CS students from Middlesex.

Olegs is delighted about winning the First Year Challenge Award “ While working on our project, we learned a lot of new things and managed to qualify for the Eurobot world competition. This prize will help us in our future projects. We are planning to participate in the next year Eurobot competition and thanks to the prize money and knowledge we gained this year, we will be able to get a much better result next year by building more advanced robots. Thank you very much for your generosity in providing the prize.”


www.eurobot.org/eurobot/objective