CMS Students in BCS Programming Competition
 The students in the CMS Team, from left to right: Demane Rodney, Alex Webber, Nabeel Moghal and Lee Mathew |
Four students from Greenwich University's School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences had to wake up at five o'clock on the morning of Saturday the 5th March. The reason for Nabeel Anwar Moghal, Lee Mathew, Demane Rodney and Alex Webber seeing an hour never before experienced by many of their colleagues was that they had to travel to Winchester and participate in the regional heats of the BCS national programming competition. They were in for a gruelling day. Because of the concentration of world-class software development companies in the South-East of England the southern region heat is possibly the toughest in the competition. Eleven other teams came from organisations such as IBM, Oracle and Cisco and universities and colleges including Cambridge, Imperial, King's and Queen Mary's.
Nabeel Moghal, who has successfully gained an industrial placement with Intel for the third year of his sandwich degree, took the initiative of putting together the team. He had previously taken part in a regional competition whilst studying Computer Science at Lahore University of Engineering and Technology before transferring as a direct entrant into the second year of the Greenwich's B.Eng. Software Engineering degree. Nabeel was joined by classmate Alex Webber from Maidstone in Kent, also a level 2 Software Engineer. Alex joined the course after completing an HND with distinctions at Medway College. Although there are some superb programmers on the current final year of the Computing Science and Software Engineering degrees who were keen to participate, the pressure of project dissertation deadlines precluded them from joining in so two PhD students, Lee Mathew and Demane Rodney, stepped into the breech to complete the team. Demane and Lee, who are respectively researching 'multilevel refinement in combinatorial optimisation' and 'gird based intelligent agents', are also Software Engineering students having both graduated with first class honours from the first cohort of the new degree last year.
The 21st annual programming competition was sponsored by Microsoft and IBM and organised by the British Computer Society, the chartered professional engineering institution responsible for information technology in the U.K.. It was hosted at the IBM Development Laboratories in Hursley Park. Each team was given an ornately gilded and panelled room in the beautiful Georgian stately home, Hursley House, a computer with the Java Eclipse development environment and four hours to tackle six questions. Readers with a knowledge of programming may like to try the questions themselves by clicking on this link.
Although the Greenwich team did not get through to the finals this year, Demane, from St. Catherine in Jamaica, who took on the responsibility of team manager, said afterwards: "Team working is the key to success in this competition. The experiences garnered in this, our first attempt bode well for our goal of wining the regional final next year and the national final the year after. Our performance this year confirms this is achievable." Lee Mathew, a mature student whose first degree had been in Politics before moving into computing and working his way up as an applications engineer and joining the Software Engineering course, said "It was great to see the value of the rapid development and programming techniques we had learnt on our degree."
The team was accompanied by Senior Lecturer Alex Fedorec who as a student from Thames Polytechnic (the precursor to the University of Greenwich) had represented the U.K. in the 1984 international programming competition held in Philadelphia. Afterwards he expressed his delight on the team's performance. "Since becoming a lecturer it has been a dream of mine to see a group of students from Greenwich compete at this level again. Given this was their first time I am extremely proud of the team's performance". He confirmed Demane's view, "Even with such stiff competition, if they go back again next year I seriously believe that with a few tactical refinements and a little more practice in agile team work, they stand a very good chance of making it to the national finals". Alex did however add "I would like to find commercial sponsorship so that next time the team can travel down in comfort and not be exhausted before they arrive". Dr. Liz Bacon, Head of the CMS School, was also delighted. She wrote a "big thank you" to the team saying "I know these competitions are tough and you did well!" Her understanding of the toughness was well-founded as she revealed in her letter that she too had taken part in the international programming competition "many years ago - too many to confess!"