AdaCore’s 4th annual “Make with Ada” programming competition is underway. Participants will be asked to design and implement an embedded software project using Ada and/or SPARK as the primary language technologies.

Projects will be evaluated upon:

• Software quality – Does the software meet its requirements?
• Openness – Is the project open source?
• New this year, “Buzz factor” – Will it appeal to the software community?

The contest runs from today until January 31, 2020 and offers over $8,000 in prizes to be broken down by:

• One First Prize - $2,000 USD
• Ten Finalist Prizes - $600 USD each

• One Student-only Prize - an Analog Discovery 2 Pro Bundle worth $299.99 USD

The winners will be announced in March 2020.

The judging panel includes Bill Wong, Senior Technology Editor at Electronic Design and Fabien Chouteau, AdaCore software engineer, and author of the Make with Ada blog post series.

“Many programmers tend to discount Ada and SPARK because of the many myths surrounding Ada, including Ada is too complex to implement and too complex to learn,” said Wong. “As contestants of this annual programming competition demonstrate, developing embedded software with Ada is a lot easier than you think, and the benefits (cost savings, quality code, fewer bugs, etc.) are many.”

“One of the main goals of our annual competition is to give more exposure to the benefits of Ada, SPARK and related technologies, so this year we have decided to improve the criteria,” said Chouteau. “In addition to software quality and open source foundations, we will be looking for projects that will appeal to the technology community in general.”

Both individuals and team participants may apply. Individuals must be at least 18 years of age and participants can work in teams of two to four with individual eligibility. Student projects must be submitted either by a student participant (age 26 or younger with a valid student ID), or a team comprised of student participants. Business-supported people/projects are not eligible.

To register, visit the Hackster.io developer platform at www.hackster.io/contests/adacore2.