20 April 2016
Team Stranders 'hiTour' crowned winning software solution.
The Department of Informatics at King’s College London and Credit Suisse have crowned Team Stranders comprising of Charlie Baker, Tahmidul Islam, Dominik Kulon, Ana Jalba, Adam Chlupacek, Phileas Hocquard, Kyle Hodgetts and Benjamin Temple, the winners of a competition to develop a software solution to a real-world problem for real-world clients. Team Stranders developed 'hiTour' in response to the Cardiac Imaging department at Royal Brompton Hospital's need, in relation to the organisation of departmental tours for prospective medical students. Their solution included a content management system that enables multimedia materials to be organised into tours in a broad range of settings, and is accessible via both iOS and Android smartphone apps.
The competition was open to undergraduate computer science students in the second year of their degree and required that they marshal their knowledge and professional skills to produce software that could eventually be employed by their clients’ organisations.
This year, there were five projects that were allocated to the teams based on their preferences. Clients included the Royal Brompton Hospital, King’s Modern Language Centre and two independent technology entrepreneurs.
On Tuesday 29 March 2016, the teams presented the results of their work in a poster session to their peers, academics, the project clients and a delegation of IT professionals from Credit Suisse who sponsor the prize for the best group project.
The quality of work was exceptionally high with most teams delivering good solutions to their clients’ problems. The five shortlisted teams were then invited to present their finished work before senior management at the Credit Suisse offices in London.
Team Stranders and Team 1Hobbyte developed hiTour and Tourable respectively, both of which were applications to enable the Cardiac Imaging department at Royal Brompton Hospital to organise tours of their department for prospective medical students.
Team GitGud produced Befriend - a new social media platform aimed at people who live alone and want to find people to share their interests in a safe environment.
Team Rocket developed Grammingo, a system to deliver interactive Grammar exercises via an Android device for the Modern Language Centre.
Team “while (true) {run();}” produced an application to pair students of a language at the Modern Language Centre with native speakers of that language.
The judges were not only impressed by the quality of the projects but also by the scale of the systems that were produced in merely eight weeks. Team Stranders' project triumphed as the winner because they developed a highly accomplished technical solution which carefully considered the full user experience and was easy for the customer to operate and maintain.