Dev Academy graduates win Act in Space National Finals

Just one week out of Enspiral Dev Academy’s web development bootcamp, graduates Ben Tairea and our very own Maddy King have won the Act in Space NZ hackathon as part of Team Mārama.

The team worked on a solution to the amount spent on repairs in space, proposing to use Virtual Reality to increase our ability to get robots to repair things instead of humans.

Maddy notes, “If we can improve our ability to use VR, then robots can do jobs instead of astronauts, saving lives, money and resources because it will mean we need to fly less people up there. It means experts on the ground can fix and assemble things on satellites using VR instead of needing astronaut training.”

The graduates worked with Augmented Reality in their final group project during the Dev Academy bootcamp, so were equipped with enough tools to launch into a VR project.

Ben notes, “It was actually noticeable how much we’d learnt about teamwork at Dev Academy- we were able to organise and communicate really well with people in our team that we’d never met before, which was crucial to our success.”

The prize for the winning team is a trip to France for the world finals, where they are very excited to represent Aotearoa on the world stage.

“It’s go time now — time to get New Zealand to space!”

If you’d like to learn the tech skills to participate in awesome new challenges, apply for Dev Academy today — www.devacademy.co.nz/apply-now.