Team TAR UC who are the Champions of the Coding track (from left to right): Khoo Wai Kang, Yong Zhen Qiang and Yee Mun Hong.
Three TAR UC students became the first ever Champions in the Coding track of the inaugural CIMB 3D Conquest. The students underwent 4 stages in the competition before emerging Champions in the finals of the national competition which took place from 30 November to 1 December 2018. The students won for themselves USD3,000, job opportunities with CIMB’s Digital Teams and will be representing Malaysia at the regional finals which will take place in January 2019.
The objective of the Coding track is to seek programmers who are able to develop applications that meet a business objective and simultaneously facilitate a seamless banking experience for customers. TAR UC’s Champion team comprises Khoo Wai Kang who is pursuing his Bachelor of Information Technology (Hons) in Software Systems Development as well as Yong Zhen Qiang and Yee Mun Hong who are studying the Bachelor of Computer Science (Hons) in Software Engineering.
Yee Mung Hong explained why his team competed in the Coding track of the competition. “Knowing that TAR UC’s academic programmes are highly industry-relevant, we chose to enter the Coding track as we learn about coding in-depth in our degree programme. And we did not regret our decision as we were faced with a stimulating challenge to develop a digital identity validation solution for mobile payments application. The task required high level of creativity and innovativeness to develop a solution that has never been used in the industry before. Besides facing the challenge of thinking of the proper solution, we also had a hard time coming up with the wireframe during one of the stages in the competition,” Mun Hong explained. Nevertheless, the students produced a solution which satisfied all the judging criteria which were completeness of solution, simplicity of customer experience and code logic.
“We are grateful to our lecturer, Ms Tan Li Peng who gave a lot of suggestions and advices on how to tackle the challenges we faced in the competition. And the most crucial part of the competition was when we were given only 24 hours to come up with the solution and we were not allowed to communicate with our lecturers or friends. This was when the three of us put our minds together to work as a team and the various skills we have learnt as a TAR UC student such as questioning the norm, researching and thinking critically came in really handy,” he excitedly shared.
