The final will be held in the Thurles campus of Shannon Technological University on 8^th March. About 125 first year DkIT students participated in the Game Jam. First year students from all the computing degrees within the school’s two computing departments (Department of Visual & Human Centred Computing and the Department of Computing & Mathematics) took part in the Game Jam.

For the competition, the students were broken up into teams of three. Teams were organised so that each student was from a different degree programme. This presented the students with the opportunity to not only participate in the event, but also to get to know other students who they would not normally interact with.

The objective of RoboCode is to create a robot war tank that can engage in combat with other tanks. Each team had to work together to programme a virtual robot. Each team was assigned a mentor and each mentor was assigned 4 or 5 groups. The mentors – who are all volunteers from the DkIT ACM Student Chapter - were from years 2, 3 and 4. For the first round of the competition, the mentors took the robots from each group that they were assigned and battle those robots against each other. Each mentor submitted the winning robot from their mini tournament to the final tournament. Eight robots were submitted to the final. After some fierce virtual battles, the winner was the robot named “Legionary”. This robot was programmed by Samuel Sukovky, Jiri Uhlir and Jianfeng Han.

These three students will now work to further develop their tank’s strategy before they go to the national final in Thurles. The DkIT ACM Student Chapter and the two computing departments wish the “Legionary” team the best of luck in the National Final.