Live at the Realtime Worlds Student Programming Competition - Part 1

The Realtime Worlds Student Programming Competition could be viewed as a step on the road from study to employment. Teams of students get a chance to prove their abilities with a selection of tough questions designed to test programming ability through, "pure technical problem solving".

These skills are invaluable for any developer and not only do the students get a chance to work as part of a team but also ask questions from the Realtime Worlds people present.

As the questions were handed out an audible silence descended on the room broken only by SquareGo grabbing a few words with Luke Halliwell and Muir McDonald.

"There are two parts to the contest", Luke began, "for the first three hours they have three questions and these are pure problem solving."

"They get a file with some input and the program they've designed just has to print out a file with some output and we compare the results to check they've solved the problem correctly. The problems they're solving should interest them."

"The second part of the competition involves a racing game. There are four cars on differing terrain and they need to go through a series of checkpoints. So each team will write a bit of AI to control the car remotely. Then we race them off on the big screen."

Muir added, "I'm the Recruitment Consultant at Realtime Worlds so I'm tasked to find talented people to work with us in development of games like APB."

"Today I'm here to help out in any way I can, chat to teams, get to know the students so we can keep in contact in the future and advise them if there are internships available in the summer and possible graduate roles in software engineering later in the year."

"Delivering APB on target is the priority at the moment so we're unclear what internships will be available. We want things to be done in the right way and not to frustrate anyone as we should ensure we can support them and give them challenging work to do. It will be determined soon but we're optimistic about places."

"The Competition's a great chance for students to chat with some of our software engineers and me informally. It gives them an idea of what it's like to work in a career at Realtime Worlds, what's involved in software engineering as well as the technical and interesting challenges involved with the work. Just taking part is great for their CV as well."

There are lots of competitions available throughout Scotland during the year with the Scottish Game Jam already being covered by SquareGo early this year. The Realtime Worlds Student Programming Competition represents something unique though and SquareGo will let you know when entries for next years event are open as the opportunities for students here are palpable.

We'll be back later with some chat with some of the teams a look at how well they did with the racing game and some afterthoughts, here.

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