Prizes have been grabbed by Code Without Borders! The winners of the high school category of the programming competition.
On 3 June 2021 the Ministry of the Interior and NISZ Zrt. open source programming competitionSinging high school winners. After two online rounds, the top ten student teams advanced to the 24-Hour National Final. In the end, the task was to create a portal for the exchange of knowledge, the 3 best of which – as the conclusion of the competition – were presented to the jury in video form by the participants. The knowledge sharing portal provides an opportunity for online communication and community building for anyone interested in the topic of open source. In addition to their own developments, the contestants have also integrated open source solutions currently available in the portals. The long-term goal of the organizers, which also inspired the assembly of the mission, is to create an open source Hungarian community that unites smaller, still island-like communities.
First prize in the high school category of the competition “mkdir team name” was won by the Vocational Training Center of Nyregyhaza Széchenyi István Technical School and the College Team (Members: Peter Gall, Dominic Ball, Pence Miklos Bora, Preparatory Teacher: Tamas Komoruchi). Second place went to the team “NemesGSZ”, Békéscsaba Vocational Training Center, Nemes Tihamér Technical School and College (Members: István Viktor Kincses, István Mucha, Olivér Paróczai, Preparatory Teacher: Brigitta Tusjak), while third place went to “Python”, Budapest. The Gábor Bethlen Primary School and Gymnasium team won (Members: Zoltán Szatmáry, Márton Szekeres, Zsombor Tersztenyák, Preparation Teacher: Andrea Hetzl).
At the award ceremony, Karoly Hajzer, Undersecretary for Informatics of the Ministry of the Interior, said: “Open source software and solutions based on open standards have long played an important role in Hungarian public administration and government informatics. The server side of many public administration systems (such as Server operating systems, database management, and word processing applications) are on the use of fully open technologies, and planning for user-side migrations has begun.”
Regarding the purpose of the competition, which was organized for the second time, he added: I would like to reduce the weakness of the state and public administration in front of commercial software, as the competition – which goes beyond the level of interest – involves young people in the appropriate environment. “Our motto is to realize the future, and BM’s belief is that we do it for the future,” said Carole Haggers.
Ferenc Banks, CEO of NISZ, explained the organizers’ goal: “We wanted students interested in programming to expand their knowledge of open source technology and demonstrate their talent in developing a real application.”
Finally, the large number of enterprising young people and the quality of the entries came as a big surprise to the competition organizers. “Beyond the world of open source, there is no support for developers and manufacturers with a large capital, and its development depends primarily on going down unfamiliar paths and sharing knowledge,” said the CEO. This has always been a major challenge, as open source is not part of the high school curriculum, which is why NISZ Zrt has created a separate competency center to reduce exposure to closed source systems and the economic aspects, i.e. costs.
“Last but not least, as a public service provider, it is important to be able to offer an alternative to citizens, where the pandemic, telecommuting and tele-education have highlighted the need for low-cost solutions for cost-sensitive households. Open source solutions are viable alternatives, and now there are Competitive solutions compared to closed systems, LibreOffice, for example, has already achieved international results,” said the CEO.
“It was a pleasure to see the quality of entries, solutions, creativity, diversity of thinking and professional solutions. We encourage everyone not to give up this enthusiasm, we ask their teachers to keep up the competition, we intend to continue to compete and hope we can welcome them as our future employees as well. It is encouraging and we are pleased Especially the competition assignments didn’t deter anyone, we could keep working, we could retire safely, Ferenc Banks concluded “because there’s a new job.”
Out of last year’s finalists, but no award winners, 3 teams made it to the top 10 this year and 2 teams made it to the podium. “By comparing the achievements over the two years, we can see that the students have gained a wide range of knowledge, arrived ready for this year’s competition, and thus created high-quality work in the final,” said Dóra Szabó, Director of Corporate and Open Source Support. Systems at NISZ Zrt.
The students started competing with more momentum this year.
The “Encode Without Borders!” contest series awarded us! The opportunity to experience the competitive environment in which we work together as a team, so it was a special experience for us, said the “mkdir” team members excitedly.
The Python team reported on their experiences, “This is the most intense and best knowledge assessment competition we have ever participated in.”
“While preparing for our project, we noticed that we needed to work together as a real team and support each other to reach the goal and achieve success. We would like to thank our class teacher, Birgitta Tosjak, who helped us throughout the preparation phase, encouraging, encouraging, strengthening, we can do this, and to the organizers Try it!” said the NemesGSZ team.
MOI and NISZ Zrt are committed to using open source applications, in 2016, the government information service provider established an open source competency center, whose development team can enjoy outstanding international success in LibreOffice development and debugging year after year.
The third place team in the High School category won a one-year e-learning subscription at Training360 Kft. , consisting of 150 trainings, in open source topics for operators and developers.
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