SoIT's News, Issue 2 2008

The National Computer Science School

The School of IT hosted 71 senior high school students and 4 teachers for the 13th National Computer Science School (NCSS) in January, 2008. NCSS was extended to 9 days for the first time with the generous support of our major sponsors, NICTA and the Macquarie Group, with significant contributions from Atlassian, Cochlear, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and the Apple University Consortium.

“Best experience ever, great fun and its really changed my opinion about uni and what I would like to study.”

The students and teachers came from all around Australia to learn Python programming and website development. In the process, they developed search engines and websites for Father Chris Riley’s Youth off the Streets charity.

To get a sense of what it would be like to work in industry, participants went on site visits to Microsoft and Atlassian, Google and Macquarie Bank.

The Apple University Consortium lent NCSS a number of MacBook Pros that some of the students used for software development.

The students got a taste of university life by staying on campus at The Women’s College. The College also hosted the formal dinner, where students and sponsors were asked to estimate on the back of an envelope: “Over what distance can a bicycle courier with a backpack of DVDs transfer information faster than a typical ADSL line?”

“The tutors were able to teach me more in a week then my school teachers teach me in a year.”

A highlight was the Programming Competition on the Friday evening, where our sponsors and School of IT staff, mentored small groups of students in solving challenging programming, web development and logic problems.

Afterwards, they discussed careers in IT over supper while the final scores were calculated.

NCSS concluded with each of the 5 groups presenting their search engines and websites to their families, NCSS sponsors, academic staff, and most importantly, our charity clients who were most impressed with the quality of the work.

NCSS is a very intense program of lectures, lab work and other activities.

It relies on the large number of NCSS and School of IT alumni who contribute their time and expertise to tutor the students, help raise sponsorship, and the run the program. We would like to thank everyone for their enormous contribution in 2008 and we look forward to working with even more alumni for NCSS 2009.

If you would like to help with sponsorship or mentoring for NCSS 2009, please contact: Ms Wei-ying Ho:
Email: ncss@it.usyd.edu.au
Phone: 61 2 9351 4917.

James Curran, Tara Murphy and Michael Cahill

NCSS Alumni Volunteers

James Curran, BSc Adv (Hons) 1999; Tara Murphy, BSc Adv (Hons) 1999; Michael Cahill, BSc (Hons) 1997; Gary Reynolds, BCST; Enoch Lau, BSc Adv (Hons) 2007; Laura Ingram, BCST (Hons) 2007, NCSS student 2003 and 2004; Nick Cooper, BCST (Hons) 2007 and Kim Upton, BCST (Hons) 2007.

NCSS Student Volunteers

Jonathan Kummerfeld, 3rd year, BSc Adv; Sam Thorogood, honours, BCST; Sam Tardif, 4th year, BCST, NCSS student 2004 and 2005; Glen Pink, 3rd year, BSc Adv; Will Cannings, 4th year, BCST, NCSS student 2003 and 2004; James Constable, 3rd year, BIT, NCSS student 2005 and 2006; Tim Dawborn, 3rd year, BIT, NCSS student 2005 and 2006; Susan Howlett, honours, BLibStudies; Anna Dominguez, 3rd year, BIT; Ben Taylor, 2nd year, BIT, NCSS student 2006 and 2007; Gareth Robinson, 2nd year, BIT; Dominick Ng, 2nd year, BIT; Laura McKemmish, 2nd year, BSc Adv; John Jiang, 2nd year, BIT and Georgina Wilcox, 2nd year, BSc Adv/BA.