Arizona State University students who won the Fastest Computer Build competition at this year’s Avnet Tech Games posed with their first-place certificates and Avnet officials. From left are Eli Chmouni, the team’s ASU faculty mentor, Avnet executive MaryAnn Miller, Avnet CEO Rick Hamada, and engineering students Troy Gerloff, Jeremy Morgan and Habib Matar. Photo courtesy of Avnet.
Three teams of engineering and computer science students in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University were among leading award winners at the recent Avnet Tech Games.
More than 200 students on more than 70 teams from 14 Arizona community colleges and universities participated in the event designed to encourage college students to sharpen their technology skills.
The ASU students were among the 31 students on winning teams to receive Avnet Tech Games scholarship awards of $1,000.
Avnet is a Fortune 500 company and one of the largest distributors of electronic components, computer products and embedded technology.
In the annual competition the company sponsors, students are presented a variety of technical scenarios that test their knowledge, creativity, decision-making and problem-solving abilities.
A panel of judges selects winners based on students’ performance on the technical requirements of various tasks, the application of innovative approaches to solving problems, and demonstration of professionalism. Judges include technology industry executives, professional engineers and business leaders.
The HP Fastest Computer Build competition involved building, fine-tuning and troubleshooting glitches on a PC.
ASU engineering management major Troy Gerloff, computer systems engineering major Habib Matar, and mechanical engineering major Jeremy Morgan won first place in the contest. The team was coached by Eli Chmouni, a faculty associate in ASU’s W. P. Carey School of Business.
Gerloff and Morgan won the same competition category in the Avnet Tech Games a year ago when they represented Chandler-Gilbert Community College.
For the Java Blitz competition, students had to use the Java 7 Standard Edition program to develop an application. Java is the dominant software development language used by many large corporations.
The teams’ performances in the Java Blitz were judged on functional requirements, code quality, overall validation, and the ability to pass sets of JUnit tests.
ASU computer science student Morgan Nesbit and software engineering student Zachary Moore took first place in the contest.
Teams participating in the Android App Showdown had to create a Google Android App, based on a set of predefined technical criteria.
The first-place award was won by ASU computer science student Matthew Vehon, and Joslene Chmouni, a business administration and management student at Northern Arizona University. They were also coached by ASU faculty member Eli Chmouni.
Jiaqi Wu contributed to this report
