McMaster students Natalie Perna and Helen Brown won the top prize in the IBM and TD Bank Programming Challenge that took place at the Canadian Celebration of Women in Computing Conference – CAN-CWiC 2016.

There were 40 teams who entered the contest, and several rounds of judging. Because they were finalists, they were flown to Ottawa for the conference, in time for the final presentations. As the top winning team they took home $1000 too!

The work was done over several weeks, and their solution “Cupful” included not only an iOS app for potential customers to find local coffee shops and restaurants, make orders and payments, just like they can do now at a few big chains, but also a web interface for small-business owners to upload their menu and other information to be discovered by their future customers. The demo included a live tweet demonstrating how this app enables techsavvy word-of-mouth advertising for small businesses.

“We’ve always had remarkable experiences at CAN-CWiC [Canadian Celebration of Women in Computing] and met inspiring women who we look forward to reconnecting with every year,” Brown said. “We feel so honoured to have won their first programming challenge, especially alongside so many other high caliber entries.” “We’ve come away with an even stronger desire to encourage young women to participate in computing, and we look forward to helping more McMaster University students participate in next year’s conference and competition,” Perna said. – (source: eng.mcmaster.ca/news”)

And yes, they’ll be demo-ing Cupful at DemoCampHamilton24!

[source: cas.mcmaster.ca/cas/NEWS]