Ada-Europe Announces 1st "Ada Way" Award Winners and "Try-and-Beat-Me" Challenge

Ada-Europe has announced the first winners of the "Ada Way" Award and thrown down the challenge to future developers using Ada. “The Ada Way” annual student programming contest was launched in September 2010 with developers challenged to build a software simulator of a football (soccer) match. In evaluating the winning authors' submission the evaluation committee reported: “This implementation of the Ada Way Soccer Simulation reveals extraordinary care and engineering skill, and represents a working, scalable, well-documented, and well-structured solution. From reading the technical documentation, it is clear that the development team faced many challenges, and in every case determined an appropriate solution through a combination of thoughtful analysis, experimentation, and clever design.” The implementation story will be told in a forthcoming issue of the Ada User Journal, the quarterly magazine of Ada-Europe. Our congratulations go to the winning student team of Ricardo Aguirre Reyes, Andrea Graziano, Marco Teoli and Alberto Zuccato, who recently received a laminated Ada Way Award donated by Ada-Europe to commend the outstanding quality of their submission. Ada-Europe has posted the full source of the reference implementation on its website, along with its accompanying technical specification, user manual and build instructions, a short demo video clip and an image of the award. The reference implementation is the benchmark for a "Try and Beat Me" open-ended challenge: any student team willing to take that challenge is invited to make a submission that attempts to improve the existing reference implementation under any of the evaluation criteria listed on the Ada Way page. New submissions will be evaluated on 15th May each year, and the best one will be awarded a minor prize and will replace the previous reference submission in the continuation of the try-and-beat-me challenge. The winning team will be announced at the Ada-Europe yearly conference. The prize for this challenge includes a framed award, an Ada book of choice, visibility in electronic and printed media, one free registration and a monetary grant of up to EUR 1000 for the winning team to use for collective participation at any future Ada-Europe conference of choice within two calendar years after selection for the prize. For more information visit www.ada-europe.org/AdaWay