Top Eight Finalists
St Benedict’s hosted the fourth IT showcase on Tuesday 30th September. The event provides an opportunity for top IT students across the country to showcase their final projects as well as to compete for prizes. This year saw 24 competitors split across the two categories of gaming and real world problems. Once again the standards of the projects were remarkably high with some projects being judged to be university level work. The showcase was open to the public, particularly IT students, and much inspiration was taken from the projects on display as well as entertainment from playing the games.
Six judges from top academic and professional IT institutions judged the projects. Max Brock, the Internal Moderator for IT in the Western Cape Department of Education; the chief judge Marike Coetzee, a Professor at the University of Johannesburg; Neil Croft an expert in the field of mobile security and privacy; Hanli Geyser, a lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand; Ken Nixon, an Associate Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand and Tony Parry, the CEO of the Institute of IT Professionals SA.
Dillon Pretorius, from Hatfield Christian School, won the Special Mention for Gaming Projects and Trystan Rivers, from Pretoria Boy’s High School, won the Special Mention for Real World Problems. The award for Most Advanced Coding went to Stirling Scholes, from St Benedict’s College for the advanced physics programmed into his educational sailing game. The award for Best Documentation as well as 3rd place overall went to Benedict Ferguson, from Penryn College. The award for 2nd place overall went to Daniel Schormann, from Penryn College. The overall winner and reciepent of the grand prize of a laptop, and iPad as well as bursaries to the University of Johannesburg and Rhodes University was Graeme Harris, for his game, Room 101, a randomly generated rogue like shooter.