'Make with Ada' programming competition offers €5000 prize

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 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. The submission deadline is 15th September, 2017, and the award winners will be announced in October 2017.

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 ($5500)
• Second Prize: €2000 ($2200)
• Third Prize: €1000 ($1100)

A Student-only Prize will also be awarded to the best-ranking Student Finalist: one Printrbot Portable 3D Printer. Entrants must provide a student ID when registering to qualify for this prize. A project submitted by a student is eligible for both the student-only prize and the cash prizes.

The panel of judges comprises embedded systems experts Jack Ganssle, Principal Consultant at The Ganssle Group; William Wong, Technical Editor at Penton Media; Richard Nass, Embedded and IoT Franchises Brand Director at OpenSystemsMedia; Cyrille Comar, AdaCore President; and Stephane Carrez, Software Engineer at Bouygues Telecom and Make with Ada 2016 competition winner.

“Judging last year’s Make with Ada competition showed me how developers new to Ada and SPARK could quickly come up to speed with these languages and produce some ingenious embedded applications,” said competition judge William Wong. “I look forward to seeing the range of projects that are submitted this year; I’m sure that the combination of software engineering talent, safe / secure languages and top-notch development tools will produce some impressive results.”

“This is an exciting opportunity for developers to try the Ada or SPARK technologies and demonstrate their imagination and programming skills,” said Fabien Chouteau, AdaCore software engineer and author of the Make with Ada blog post series. “Ada and SPARK are most known for their track record in large-scale long-lived systems, but you can use these languages and AdaCore’s tools for software that has to run in the most resource-limited embedded environments including bare metal targets.”

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 (u.adacore.com), and the various resources for free software developers and students/hobbyists at the GitHub repository and the libre site.