Students h-appy to win tech challenge

ATEAM of students from Edge Hill University celebrated victory in the finals of the prestigious University Technology Challenge at MediaCityUK, enhancing their employability and boosting their career prospects.

Holly Davies, Greg King, Ross Carter, Anthony McGarry, Alex Parry-Brown, Sean Cook and James Fisher who all study Computer Science at Edge Hill, impressed the judges and emerged as the 2016 Barclays Technology Challenge winners.

The students worked on the Barclay’s brief which involved developing an app to assist Barclays customers with demands for online shopping.

They worked on the project over four weeks, designing a system, creating a prototype and proposing an infrastructure to build and support within a specified budget before pitching their system against teams from five other North West universities and judges from BBC, Barclays and Bank of America.

As well as winning Amazon vouchers, the team have been awarded a work experience placement of their choice at either the Bank of America, BBC or Barclays.

“The Technology Challenge has been a beneficial experience in a variety of ways,” said Alex Parry-Brown.

“Working using a real life scenario and trying to provide a solution to the brief within a budget was certainly a new challenge for me.

“In this aspect it has helped me develop a much better understanding of the types of challenges developers face when trying to implement new software, along with expanding my knowledge on the types of methodologies and technology currently used within industry.”

Professor Nik Bessis, head of Computer Science at Edge Hill, said: “We were thrilled with our students’ achievement, our team performed brilliantly throughout the competition.

“The Computer Science department encourages students to participate in extracurricular employability initiatives that improve their enterprise and employability skills.”

Helen Walters, Edge Hill’s knowledge exchange and enterprise co-ordinator, added: “Employability is critical given how competitive the graduate employment market is; equipping our students not only with a degree but the opportunity to build assets on their CV is essential for the future success.”