Re: Make with Ada 2019 : DogRobot

[fabien.chouteau@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, March 26, 2019 at 2:05:19 PM UTC+1, Rego, P. wrote:
> I am very sorry for this outburst, but I couldn't not keep it quiet. I was naive thinking this contest was serious.  It could be a good opportunity to share the other communities that making software with Ada is to make different and better software. So I am very ashamed of having participated this edition. It was really a waste of time and (very much) personal effort.
> 

Hi Pablo,

I work for AdaCore and I am one of the organizer of the Make with Ada competition. We received similar feedback here and there, so I want to give you my point of view on the matter.

We understand that the results can seem unfair, in part because the winning project is not technically complex.

For the Make with Ada competitions we never had a criteria on the complexity of the problem addressed, the complexity of the solution, the number of lines of code or anything of that nature. The intent was to have the competition open to everyone, including beginners.
The result is that the focus is more on how well you explain your project than the complexity of the project itself.

This worked well for us in the first two editions, so we kept it that way for the third.

We are open to suggestions on how to fix this. We do have some ideas:

 - Introduce a complexity factor in the judging.

 - Remove this strict judging process and just have "AdaCore" pick the projects that are the most impressive/cool. But that means it is very difficult for contestants to know what will be valued in their project.
 
 - Have more winners by spreading the prizes. e.g. 8 winners at 1000 euros instead of 5000, 2000 and 1000.


Thanks for you feedback, and let us know if you have an idea to make the next Make with Ada even better.