IBM University Team Challenge 2008

I was lucky enough to be invited to the IBM University Tem Challange 2008 event, formally known as “IBM Thinkpad Challenge”.

I was in a team of four to represent the University of Bristol amongst many other universities such as Oxford, Durham, Southampton, Warwick, York etc, roughly 15 other Universities were attending this event.

The event was split into two events, one on the 25th Sep and one on the 26th.

The first event was hosted at the Novotel hotel in Southampton where each team was given a set of questions about different IBM’ers (IBM Staff who were hosting the event). After having a chance to find out some of the answers, we enjoyed a free meal before introducing our own team, then another University team and finally answering some of the questions on the quiz. The best answers being re-warded with prizes.

For the main event, we were taken by coach to the IBM Hursley Labs in Winchester. We were given various talks by IBM staff discussing different fields of interest, Andy Stratford gave a fascinating talk about devices he’s created that log his houses electricity and water supplies, along with a number of other features this has been extended too. Anyway back to the event, after the talks we were given a tour of the Hursley Lab grounds. On returning we set our challenge by which we had to complete as many tasks as possible out of an available 24 tasks. These tasks were a range of types i.e. physical, logical, mystery . . . and tokens were awarded for completed tasks. These tokens were used for the second and final task.

Each University was given a laptop and had to answer 30 questions selecting simple, medium and difficult style questions, tokens being used to reduce the answer time to answer the questions. The quickest answers were awarded the points.

The winning team was Durham, each member of the Durham team was given a Thinkpad laptop and Durham University was awarded £1000. Well done Durham!

It was a great event to attend and strongly recommend anyone with the opportunity to attend, to go.

Finally I would like to thank everyone at IBM for organising the event, Dr Kirsten Cater for organising the University of Bristol’s involvement in the event and also to May Gunn for being our host for the event.