Tasks and Programming Problems
As already mentioned within the article before, Challenge24 is an International 24-hours Programming Contest being held in Hungary. The contest offers young talented people the possibility to measure their own capabilities and programming skills. Strictly speaking the contestants have to solve a problem and develop a fully functional software prototype. This prototype has to be built in teams consisting of at least two people.
At the beginning of the contest every team gets its own task which has to be completed within 24 hours. Although 24 hours mean that the teams get a whole day in order to solve the problem, it is nevertheless a short time because of the fact that the tasks are characterized to be very complex, demanding and time-consuming. In order to finish and complete the tasks successfully, the teams should split up the whole tasks into several smaller parts, each of which can be developed at the same time and in parallel by the team members. Moreover this method turns out to be very useful because every participant possesses his / her different IT skills such as for example computer graphics, algorithm theory or basic knowledge of networking. After having completed each part of the whole task it is essential that the team brings all tasks together in order to build the complete and full-functional prototype.
Examples for possible tasks within the Programming Contest:
- Forex Trading Software: The first example represents a software for forex dealers in order to manage their different trading transactions. Furthermore the software makes it possible to organize all actual and future transactions as well as commercial deals. All in all the software should be able to present historical data and actual exchange rates in form of different graphical charts.
- Last Minute Booking Software: The second example is about a software for a Last Minute Company. This software should be able to handle a huge database of last minute datasets providing different booking information. A full text search has to be implemented in order to give users the possibility to search for offers matching their individual demands like target country or category of the hotel.
- Simulation Software for Mountainbikes: The third task is a software to simulate different mountain bike racing tracks in different terrains. It should offer the feature to provide different parameters like nature of the ground, different humidity or the uphill grade.