BCS-in-Scotland sponsors ScotlandIS Young Software Engineer of the Year awards

Women sweep the board at Scottish software engineering awards

BCS-in-Scotland continued its sponsorship of the second prize at the Scotland IS Young Software Engineer of the Year awards which were presented at the ScotSoft 2017 dinner on 5th October 2017.

The Young Software Engineer of the Year awards are given for the best undergraduate software projects, drawn from across all students studying computer science and software engineering in Scotland. Each university nominates the very best final year undergraduate software engineering project to be submitted for the awards.

The BCS sponsored prize was won by Orisa Ngampakdeepanich of University of Edinburgh. She was presented with a cheque for £2000 by Rob Deri, BCS Finance Director. Orisa's project was Peter’s Adventure – A tablet app to elicit pretend play with children with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) . This project set out to create an effective educational tool using augmented reality to help children with ASC, to counteract some of the developmental challenges they face.

Due to an inability to engage in ‘pretend play’, children with ASC suffer from developmental delays in symbolic and divergent thinking, impacting their cognitive, language and social development. As augmented reality (AR) systems are able to visually conceptualise elements this can help enhance the initial steps a child with ASC takes into ‘pretend play’, a key element of child development, by designing a story-based AR tablet game.

For a project with enormous potential in helping young children with ACS the judges considered Orisa to be a well deserved runner-up.

Orisa was born in Thailand but grew up in Singapore. Inspired by how her father applied Computer Science to automate his work, she decided to study computing at the University of Edinburgh and is excited by the potential to explore new ideas for new ideas. A keen dancer and baker, Orisa is now studying for a Masters at Edinburgh.

The first prize, sponsored by Sopra Steria, was awarded to Gala Malbasic of University of St Andrews for her project Leap Up: The Keyboard Renaissance. This project set out to simplify some of the complex keyboard short cut sequences that people use when working with laptops and tablets, and reduce the need to use both mouse and keyboard.

The third prize, sponsored by Edge Testing, was awarded to Irina Camilleri of the University of Strathclyde for project Enriching Cycling Maps though Crowdsourcing Sensor Data. This project explored the possibility of gathering map data using sensors, crowdsourcing some of the detail that cyclists (and their bikes) can gather, enabling maps to be constantly updated and improved over time. With the increasing use of sensors, traffic monitoring data and road condition information could be fed back to the maps.

The Leidos Software Engineering Award went to Amy Parent of the University of Abertay. Her project, AHA Bus and FCore, a modular ‘bus’ system for high altitude balloon missions addressed a technical challenge. Most high-altitude balloon missions need custom built technical systems – the ‘bus’ provides a common standardised interface.

More details from ScotlandIS ...