Expanding on last nights post as promised…
Thursday I went down to Southampton with a group of us from Leeds uni to represent the school of computing in a national competition hosted by IBM named the ‘university challenge’ where the top 17 uni’s (or uni’s with good computing schools?? Who knows…) compete in games and quizzes to win a laptaop each and have the honor of winning.
The 4.5 hours train journey down there was very pleasent, time flew as conversation was good – its amazing how much I learnt about global politics (a subject i have avoided in the past but sparks intrest). We arrived at the Novetol hotel in Southampton where we checked in, listened to Jazz (I shared a room with Kieron d:), had a few free IBM donated drinks, (I got the most expensive whiskey they had mmmm haha) and talked about an array of computing related topics with friends and with IBM staff.
IBM then generously fed us all a posh meal at one of the hotels conference rooms where each uni had one table, each with one IBM member of staff joining us. We seemed to have the ‘man in charge’ of uni relations as our accompanying staff member, and I heard he was meant to be the IBM staff member that was meant to come up and judge our SE24 presentations, he seems to have some speacial relationship with leeds… is it becasue were good honest unarragent (generaly speaking) hard working students, or is it becasue he went their himself? Who knows.
Each table had a countries flag and we had to as a group draw the shape of the flags representing country and cover the picture with facts abut said country. We got Finland, Matt and James gathered loads of facts from wikipedia and google via their mobile phones and used goole maps for the countries shape. We got a lot of information on this small piece of paper!
After the meal a spokesperson from each uni had to say why their uni/city was good andexplain the image/information about said country. I had a good laugh listening to some uni’s ramblings lol, “Romania!!” (was that Sheffield?) was especially humorous and the guy who spoke for Imperial College London was some kind of wannabe-neo-nazi angry arragent SOAB who got booooed by the audience and got shown up by our Joanne (: good times. We then got merry at the bar, some of us lifted shirts haha and had a jolly good time.
Friday morning I listened to IBM advertising themselves in a series of presentations about future technologies, past achievements as a corporation etc. All was very informative, and I listened keenly due to the amount of coffee i had drank in the morning! We then particapated in the challenge, we had to complete as many challenges as possable innthe 2.5 hour time limit, there were various different types of tasks available to us – logic, communication, sensory, physical, mystry etc. and we got one gold star for achiving one task and points doubled if we managed to pass one of each category 8probably awarding us for a multi skilled team).
Unfortuently we started with a hard logic based task where one team member had to assemble a puzzle, hioch was dissasembled, remember the puzzle, and then the rest of the group had to give directions to another team member who hasnt seen the puzzle to build it again. We did good and nearlly passed this task although it took ages to do! We made a hiccup on the last stage and decided to quit, therefore we wasted 45 mins of quality time. We were all annoyed at this stage!
The second task we did was building functions to create the required output. We did well and passed quickly. the next we played table football blindfolded with Matt directing our hands, very fun and Matt was a legend! We then had to design our own protocol with smell, sight and hearing as the syntax and guide a team member round this yellow brick road, fun and we did well. For the physical task four of us danced to familiar pop songs and two of us had to guess the song, we made all the IBM team in the room burst out laughing and came up with some great mimes! We got congratulated for our efforts and great dancing skills (;
The timed general knowledge quiz was next, we did relativly quite well in this stage and answered most correcly and more correcly then most other uni’s we could gaze upon in the room. In the end Cambridge won the laptops, we did well but I was dissapointed for a little while but I had fun within the two days and definently dont regret going.
The journey back was longer than antisapated due to Birmingham grrrr, but was still fun as I talked to randomers about rave music and made what we thought was a microsoft employee laugh hehe
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