ARL Staff Blog

At the start of 2016 the golf team spent three weeks in the Middle East. It’s always a culture shock for the boys and the golf often competes with the camel riding, dune bashing, and late night shenanigans. The tournaments all went really well and the training of the new operator, Reece Witters, was completed. The team worked in Abu Dhabi, Doha and Dubai over the three weeks and spent time with ball-tracking company ProTracer to integrate the virtual world with the 3D ball tracks.

This Tuesday, I supported the Department of Information Science at the University of Otago as a judge and speaker at the Programming Challenge 4 Girls. The aim of this international one day event is to introduce junior high school girls to computer programming and to show them the fun and combination of logic, problem-solving and creativity that is involved in the process of programming. The task of the challenge was to program an animation telling the story of Aliens meeting Dragons in a 3D world. There were 30 teams from 9 different schools, with each team consisting of 2 girls. Some of them had no programming experience at all, whilst others have programming in their curriculum.

The other judges and I had a lot of fun in seeing the different outcomes of the programming skills of the girls. At the end of the day, I gave a talk about my work in the IT industry, and in particular at Animation Research Ltd, and the opportunities that the field of Information Technology has to offer. It is exciting so see so many girls in a programming contest and it is great that the Department of Information Science organized this day, since it is important to encourage more girls to work in IT.