AdaCore Launches “Make with Ada” Programming Competition, with €5000 Top Prize

AdaCore Launches “Make with Ada” Programming Competition, with €5000 Top Prize

[fabien.chouteau]

AdaCore today announced the launch of the “Make with Ada” programming competition, a contest that aims to help the embedded software community improve the quality of their code by encouraging the use of the Ada and SPARK programming languages. The competition will run from June 20 to September 30, 2016 and offers over €8000 in total prizes. Participants can register for the competition at www.makewithada.org.

Competition Rules
The competition is open to individuals and to teams with up to four members. The goal is to design and implement an embedded software project for an ARM Cortex M or R processor where Ada and/or SPARK are the principal language technologies. Entrants will need to demonstrate that their system meets its requirements and has been developed using sound software engineering practices. Submission deadline is September 30, 2016. The award winners will be announced in November 2016.

Prizes and Judging Criteria
Cash prizes will be awarded to the projects that best meet the overall criteria of software dependability, openness, collaborativeness and inventiveness.

    Top Prize - 5000 Euros
    Second Prize – 2000 Euros
    Third Prize – 1000 Euros

Two special awards (nano-drones) will also be offered: one for the project rated best for dependability, and the other for the project rated best for inventiveness.

Judges
The competition judges include embedded systems experts Jack Ganssle, Principal Consultant at The Ganssle Group; Dick Selwood, Europe Editor at TechfocusMedia; Bill Wong, Technical Editor at Penton Media; and Cyrille Comar, AdaCore President.

“Building an application in Ada on a deeply-embedded microcontroller like the Cortex M or R will be a ton of fun, and is a great way to demonstrate how Ada leads to great code,” said competition judge Jack Ganssle.

“This is an exciting opportunity for developers to try a new technology and show their imagination and programming talents,” said Fabien Chouteau, AdaCore software engineer and author of the Make With Ada blog post series. “Ada is most known for its usage in large-scale long-lived systems but it is also an excellent tool even for the most humble embedded project.”

The “Make with Ada” competition is part of an overall AdaCore initiative to foster the growth of Ada and SPARK for developing embedded systems and more generally for developing “software that matters”. Other elements of this initiative are the free on-line training available at AdaCore U, and the various resources for free software developers and students/hobbyists at the github repository and the libre site.

Further information about Ada and SPARK, along with links to free resource pages and instructions on how to get started by downloading the GNAT GPL edition for Bare Board ARM, are available at makewithada.org/getting-started.