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Infosys legend – Kris Gopalakrishnan announces competition for young coders

TechnoparkToday.com(Feb, 2015): Budding young programmers who received free Raspberry Pi computers today under a pioneering IT education project of the Kerala government were given a further incentive to learn and experiment with their shiny new gadgets after Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan announced a coding contest offering prizes worth Rs 4.8 lakh.

Kris Gopalakrishnan
Kris Gopalakrishnan

The IT legend, who was present at the state-wide inauguration of the Learn to Code programme by Chief Minister Oommen Chandy at North Paravur on Saturday, said he would reward the best programs or games developed by the students.More than 2,500 Class VIII students from Government aided schools across the 14 districts of the states were given kits consisting of a Raspberry Pi B+ board, Enclosure, 8 GB SD card, HDMI cable, HDMI to VGA cable, USB keyboard and USB Mouse.

These students were selected after an aptitude test conducted in their schools and will now be trained to program by the faculty of IT@School, which is partnering Technopark-Technology Business Incubator (T-TBI) and Startup Village for the project.

The contest will open in April-May and will require the students to develop a program or a computer game. These will be demonstrated at the Startup Village between May 21 and 30. The best programmer from each district will get a cash prize of Rs 20,000 and the state-level winner will take home Rs 2,00,000.

It was Mr Gopalakrishnan who proposed the concept of ‘Learn to Code’ to the Kerala government with the aim of fostering a generation of IT innovators and entrepreneurs in Kerala.He said youngsters today have the resources and the opportunities to pursue dreams that would have been impossible for most a few generations ago.

“My first introduction to computers was in the 70s when I was at IIT Madras; it was a mainframe computer the size of a hall with 2MB of memory and speed of 100 nanoseconds.Today you get to work with tiny gadgets that are 100 times faster and have 4000 times the memory,” he told the students. “You should be able to learn so much from this little device that you should be able to start companies in the future.”

       

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