Did you walk by the IT Challenge room last night and earlier today? It’s been so quiet in there the past 24 hours. You could hear a pin drop. What’s been up in there? Inquiring minds wanted to know. So…I asked Rand Morimoto the IT Challenge captain (for the 5th year) for the scoop. He pointed me to his day by day blog that has a recap of the entire IT Challenge experience.
Photo at left features the following IT Challenge competitors and judges: [back row] Jeff Guillet (judge), Thiago Cabral Valverde (Brazil), Miklos Cari Sivila (Bolivia), Mohamed Karim Es Skalli (Morocco), Abdul Rauf Butt (UK), Sebastien Cubito (France), Roland Sarkozi (Hungary), Mike Burr (USA), Chang Wu (China), Rand Morimoto (Head Judge), Valy Greavu (Judge) [squatting] Cosmin Ilie (Romania), Sherif Talaat (Egypt)
Each competitor was given a 9-page case study based on this year's competition theme "Imagine a world where technology helps solve the world's toughest problems". The scenario was about a non-profit organization that is providing computer training to children ages 12-17 worldwide who otherwise do not have access to computers. The main office of the non-profit is where all administration takes place, and then there are remote training facility offices where the trainings will take place. These remote training facilities will pop up worldwide, and the competitors needed to build out the infrastructure for both the main administration office and the first training facility.
Some of the requirements the competitors needed to setup:
- email communications including presence and chat
- ability to share documents and collaborate internally and externally
- ability to create and post forms on a Website
- ability to manage data in a database
For those familiar with various Microsoft technologies, the competitors were given a workstation and a single physical host server (8-core / 32GB Ram / 500GB of disk) and needed to setup Hyper-V for virtualization and work with a variety of Microsoft server products like Windows 2008, Exchange 2007, SQL 2008, SharePoint 2007, ISA 2006, System Center Operations Mgr 2007, System Center Configuration Mgr 2007, ForeFront security, etc.
Rand’s blog has great information on the entire IT Challenge experience. It’s worth the read.
Update on Sunday a.m.: The students are finished! It has been 24-hours since they started this competition. As they completed the competition, Rand reminded the students that it wasn't about being "first" this week, it's about competing! Regardless of where these competitors end up in the scoring, they are #1 in their country and they are at worse #10 in the world among 300,000 students that started this competition way back in September 2008!
As they wrapped up the competition phase and moved into the 5-hours of judging, Rand thanks his co-Captain, Chris Amaris, whom after 5 years with the competition, is an amazing supporter of education, learning, skills development, and motivation to so many in the IT industry! To Jeff Guillet and Valy Greavu, the judges, he thanks them for being the mentors and supporters of the students to make this a wonderful competition.
And lastly, to the 10 competitors, get some sleep, and enjoy the rest of the week here in Cairo among the pyramids and antiquities . On July 7th at the Worldwide Finals Awards Ceremony, Rand will announce the top 3 finishers of this year’s IT Challenge competition!
- Toddy Dyer
