2008 IEEEXtreme results

IEEEXtreme 2008 was held on 8 March with 130 student teams from 31 countries around the world. It was truly a global event! Congratulations to all participants.

Congratulations to the University of North Texas for winning first place in IEEEXtreme 2008! The team knapsackers at UNT scored the extreme total of 1270.25 points.

Our added congratulations to the top ten teams listed below. These outstanding teams are listed by the place and the total number of points they scored.

To all participants, our warmest congratulations for your positive energy, enthusiasm and interest. The objectives of the program have been met – participants to have fun, learn from their experiences and promote awareness that IEEE membership is for students interested in technology careers including engineering, computer science and information technology. Top ten team members names have been added.

Student Branch	Team	Region	Total Points
University of North Texas	knapsackers at UNT	R5	1270.25
Carnegie Mellon University-Qatar	Qatarpillars	R8	983
University of Cyprus	DMT	R8	931.5
University of California-San Diego	Bagpipe lubricators	R6	903.75
Jacobs University Bremen	Bucuresti X3	R8	895
Sharif University of Technology	Diamond	R8	894.7
University of Florida	UF 1	R3	890.7
Universidad Politecnica de Catalunya	Telecom BCN	R8	841.50
Jacobs University Bremen	KenLee	R8	840.3
Bilkent University l	Caspian	R8	832.2

The 2008 program got off to a great start with publicity in IEEE Potentials magazine and online alerts in the Institute newspaper and IEEEXtreme images on web sites around the world. 8 March 2008 was the date and by the beginning of the week of the competition, 100 teams of IEEE student members or graduate student members signed up for the program – an excellent rate of participation for the second edition. By the end of the week and the contest was about to start, a remarkable 130 teams had registered!

With the proctors who volunteered their time, we had over 350 participants for the challenge from 31 countries. During the 24 hours, there were 16 problems for the teams to solve. At the start of the contest, the first booklet of 10 problems was distributed to all the proctors. The information was also placed on the web, so everyone had access to the same information at the same time. To keep interest high, a second set of problems was sent after 8 hours and then at hour 16, the final set of problems was sent.

During the competition there was so much positive energy from the competitors. Participants were ready to go and the event was a huge success.

The organization team members included Ricardo J. Machado, Project leader, Pedro Guerreiro, Chief Judge, Marko Delimar, Elizabeth Johnston, Communications, Laura Durrett and Christine Eldridge, Publicity, registration and logistics. The Orga team members were all online and were able to field all questions online during the 24 hours of the competition. We learned from the first event and also had 10-12 technical judges rotating their time during the 24 hours to answer the technical questions posed by the student participants. The students were sharp and had challenging questions. When the contest ended at GMT 24, all participants logged off sleepily. Kudos to all of those involved that helped make this event a tremendous success for the students.

Stay tuned for information on the next edition of IEEEXtreme.