Almost 200 people viewed the projects on display at Software Quest '99, an annual software development competition for students held last week.
The group of Ümit Akkuş, Bedirhan Urgun, Yunus Kılıç, Berkin Özmen, Orhan Camoğlu, Seyhmus İnci, Mehmet Çakır and S. Ahmet Bolaç were awarded first place by Computer Engineering and Information Science faculty members and Software Quest visitors. Their project, an Internet-based game called "Let it Bee" was done as part of the first year CS102 course. The group also shared the prize for Best First Year Project with entries from Arda Çelebi, Güral Vural and Ozan Erinçkan. The Turkish Text-to-Speech project of Göker Canitezer and Barış Eker took second place, with Arda Çelebi's Okey game taking third place overall as well as the Special Prize awarded by the Computer Club.
The prizes (books, computer CDs, and computer hardware donated by local sponsors) were presented to the winners at a ceremony following the evening's entertainment, a strictly for-fun computer industry trivia quiz. Four teams were selected at random from the 14 teams that registered for the quiz. They competed against each other and against the audience. The winning team (Computer Engineering and Information Science graduate students Emek Eraslan, Murat Atun and Ülker Cengiz) just barely beat the 120-strong audience in a very close fought contest! All participants received a year's subscription to TÜBİTAK's Bilim Teknik magazine, and the winners also received two computer CD-ROMs courtesy of the evening's sponsor, Halıcı Bilgi İşlem.
The organizers would like to thank all the participants and visitors for making Software Quest '99 an outstanding success. We look forward to seeing you all again next year at Software Quest 2000. There are only 12 months left, so start working on your project now!