A group of 50 high school students from IES Francisco Umbral (Ciempozuelos) and from IES Arquitecto Ventura Rodríguez (Boadilla del Monte) participated in the “Gymkhana: Software Matters”, organized by IMDEA Software Institute on the occasion of the XXIII Science and Innovation Week, organized by the Community of Madrid in collaboration with the Madrimasd Foundation.
Blanca Gutiérrez, head of communications at the Institute, welcomed the attendees, presented the activity and provided the basic guidelines to the students from both centers, aged between 17 and 30 years old.
The students were divided into five groups and had to follow a map to reach the five Gymkhana challenges. Each of the challenges addressed software-related topics such as: artificial intelligence, concurrency, parallel addition, program analysis and verification, and cryptography.
They had 13 minutes to solve each challenge where Claudia Bartoli, Diego Castejón, Martín Ceresa, Chana Weil-Kennedy, Fernando Macías, Gaspard Anthoine, Daniel Jurjo, Konstantinos Papaioannou, Alessio Mansutti and Georgia Christofidi were waiting for them as responsible for the challenges to explain everything they needed to solve the problems as a team.
Once the “Gymkhana: Software Matters” was over, the groups met in the auditorium, where the researchers explained the solutions to all the challenges and solved the doubts that some students had. Afterwards, the researchers counted the scores to discover the winning team and the prizes were awarded to the eight members of the winning team, from IES Francisco Umbral.
Finally, the director of the Institute, Manuel Carro, closed the event by emphasizing the research carried out at the Institute and the importance of the software.
