code::XtremeApps::2010 goes green

code::XtremeApps, the annual Singapore 24-hour computer programming competition organised by the Information Technology Standards Committee (ITSC), is going green this year with its theme.

Competitors will be required to create an application to promote awareness of environmental issues and sustainable living. The details of the competition guidelines were released last Wednesday 21st April to the public and media, and can be found online here.

This is the fourth year that ITSC has run code:XtremeApps, and the top three teams for both the Open (above 12 years of age) and Junior (below 12 years of age) will stand to win attractive prizes like S$9,000 in cash (per team) or electronic devices.

In the Open category, participating teams will need to develop an online or mobile application in a 24 hour programming jam from Friday 23rd July 1800hrs to Saturday 24th July 1800hrs.

Teams must make use of one of three platforms — local company G Element’s 3D application tool GermaniumWeb, RedHat’s open source middleware stack JBoss, or Microsoft’s open datasets from Project Nimbus — to code their application.

Contestants will be given a set of scenarios based on the green theme to chose from on the day of the competition, which will be held at the Singapore Management University (SMU) School of Information Systems.

More information and some past interviews on the previous year’s competition can be found in the YouTube video below:

For the Junior cetegory, children younger than 12 years will be asked to build an animated story or programme using Scratch, a simple-to-use programming tool developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab. The kids will be given about four weeks to conceptualize and develop their entries before the June 28th submission dateline.

Here’s a video on Vimeo that explains what Scratch is about:

According to Dr Leong Hon Wai, the key judge who organizes and picks the programming platform for the code::XtremeApps Junior category every year since 2008, he expects that 30 to 40 teams will participate in the competition.

This was the number of teams that participated in last year’s code::XtremeApps::2009 Junior category programming challenge, which was using Squeak Smalltalk. Dr Leong is a professor at the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) School of Computing.

Kids certainly start programming earlier nowadays. And we’ve definitely moved past the days of BASIC — interpreters rather than compiled code anybody? — from which I have fond memories coding on when I was in secondary school in the late 1980s. Ah well.