UL winners of the 2024 National Robocode Programming Competition
Thursday, 7 March 2024

Congratulations to our UL team who yesterday, emerged overall winners in the 2024 National Robocode Programming competition which was held as part of the 2024 Games Fleadh at TUS, Thurles, Tipperary (http://www.gamesfleadh.ie/compete/robocode/).

Robocode is an annual programming competition open to first year Full Time Undergraduate students. It is intended as an opportunity for these students to demonstrate their programming abilities and advance their knowledge of GUI programming, API usage and Artificial Intelligence. Each team codes their tanks functionality using the Java programming language. The little graphical tanks need to be programmed to avoid being hit while finding and hitting their opponents without any kind of manual intervention.

Since 2010, UL ICT students’ participation in this competition and other similar annual competitions has been organised and managed by the ICT Learning Centre as part of our aim to enhance and broaden the students’ ICT skill-sets, promote active and student centred learning and to promote ICT as a career path. Working with all first-year ICT undergraduate students’ in UL every year, the centre invites and encourages students’ participation, manages team selection via internal competitions, and provides team training and mentoring.

Our winning Team this year (UL_Seesaw) was made up of three LM121 - Computer Science Common entry students, namely :

Nathan Ndlovu
Lewis Ubebe
Maksims Gerkis

This year four institutions were represented (one team per institution) in the competition and over the course of a very exciting morning, UL_seesaw’s robot tank engaged in individual combats with the robots from each institution on the way to the semi-final, where, in a tense series of engagements against TUS (Moylish) won 7-5, resulting in a final between the UL and TUS (Thurles) robots where UL emerged victorious (9-6). We last won this title in 2016 so are very proud of our students achievement.

Once again we’d like to congratulate our students on their achievement.