Code Hunt Wrap-Up
Our Code Hunt competition has come to a close, and we’re very excited by the results.
Our goal here at Imagine Cup is to promote student developers and encourage new students to learn to code. The three major Imagine Cup competitions – Games, Innovation and World Citizenship – are part of that mission, but they’re also huge projects, requiring you to put together a team and work for months and months to develop a complete solution. Not everyone has the time, or the resources, to build an entire Imagine Cup project, and we wanted to get every student developer we could reach on-board with Imagine Cup.
That’s where Code Hunt came in. When we first planned out Code Hunt, our goal was to offer you an individual challenge that would be easy to get involved in, but would also challenge you to demonstrate and develop your coding skills. Our friends at Microsoft Research came to us with a solution: a live, timed coding challenge where participants would be rated on the completeness and elegance of their solutions.
The result has been an amazing success; you’ve tackled even the toughest challenges we’ve presented, with every single Code Hunt resulting in at least one perfect score. Before we move on to the winners, we’d like to share a little behind-the-scenes information about Code Hunt with you.
The Puzzle Master, responsible for the devious challenges you overcame, was Professor Nigel Horspool of the University of Victoria, Canada. If you’d like to read more about Code Hunt, the team behind it, and some of the work they’re doing with the project, take a look at the Code Hunt Community site, and this recent blog post by Judith Bishop, Director of Computer Science at Microsoft Research.
One of the goals of Code Hunt was to identify top coding talent, and over the eight Code Hunt challenges, we’ve found quite a few amazing student developers. In every Code Hunt, we saw the same names hovering around the top, often with the winner decided by a tiny sliver of a margin above the scores of the runners-up.
Our monthly winners, each of whom has done an amazing job, are:
- April Winner: Richard Gebauer, Germany
- March Winner: Tobias Kahlert, Germany
- February Winner: Henning Dieterichs, Germany
- January Winner: Adam Żychowski, Poland
- December Winner: Alexander Ermichev, Russia
- November Winner: Vincent Hsiao, United States
- October Winner: Dawid Bugajewski, Poland
- September Winner: Alin-Silviu Butnaru, Romania
Of course, another goal for Code Hunt was simply to get you excited about Imagine Cup, excited about participating, and excited about code. So in addition to our monthly winners, we’re choosing a single participant, out of everyone that took their best shot at solving our puzzles, and awarding them our Code Hunt Grand Prize of $5000.
We’re pleased to announce our Grand Prize Winner is Kapil Motiyani, a student at NIIT in India. Congratulations, Kapil!
We’ve got more exciting competitions in store for you in the next season of Imagine Cup, so keep an eye on imaginecup.com and consider signing up for the Imagine Newsletter for the latest information about student development and competitions.
See you next season for Imagine Cup 2016!