NEBRASKA CHALLENGE

Our Mission isn’t to be the fastest or the cheapest; we want to be the best

sbc

Saturday March 30th, Students from Nebraska schools gathered at the new Assurity Center for a full day of coding with hopes to win cash prizes. The Software Builders Challenge is all about working on a real world problem. When students are in school they are learning theory but often don’t know how it applies in the real world. This years challenge focused on technology’s role in agriculture.

 The objective

Build a web based application that allows a farmer to check on the status of their pivot from any internet connected device. Participants were given sample data outputs from the pivot for the competition such as On/Off, forward/reverse, wet/dry as well as weather data that effects evaporation loss and optimum soil soak.

The goal of the competition wasn’t to generate the maximum amount of working code in 6hrs or to simply display the data, judges were looking for creative idea’s on what could be achieved with the data provided. Teams provided solutions that included predictive forecasting and automation based on weather, wind speed and other factors to conserve water. Some teams used math equations to achieve a maximum soil soak percentage and others even called a farmer to figure out what information was actually going to be used before writing a single line of code.

This years winners were:

1st Place ($1000 cash prize) – Aditya Relangi, Rahul Sharma, Yurong Wang & Bakhtiar Kasi from UNL

2nd Place – ($500 cash prize) – Jacob Krings, Marcus Gubanyi & Dalton Wingnall – Concordia University

3rd Place – ($250 cash prize) – Hannah Ley, Alexis Kennedy, Jackson Warner, Spencer Watson – ITFP

2013 Sponsors

2013 Software Builders Challenge Photos: (more photo’s coming soon!)