Last Wednesday we had the award ceremony for the winner of Student LabVIEW Coding Challenge 2015, SLVCC15. The task for this year challenge was to develop a LabVIEW application, a Whistle Star game. Using the computers build-in sound card, the player whistling was to be sampled and compared to the opening tunes of “Twinkle twinkle little star”. The developer could decide themselves of how the scoring to the results were to be made.

The winner, William Tidelund, had chosen a simple state-machine design pattern in LabVIEW as the base for his application. The jury of experienced LabVIEW specialists thought this was a good starting point for this kind of application. One comment was “If this application was to be developed further it would probably be wise to switch to a multi-loop design. The use of sub-vi:s facilitates this, but more organised code would make it even easier.“

William had understood the task well. His application was very good from a functionality point of view, but it lacked some work from a user experience point of view. The jury thought this is however made with the right priority, getting the system to work before making it pretty. All the specified requirements were fulfilled and William had included some extra functionality adding to the usability. The jury concludes “It is obvious that you have understood the design you are working with and make full use of it, which is the key to making the application work so well. Congratulations on a job well done!”