PA Consulting Group Sets Programming Challenge to School Pupils, Students and IT Professionals to Help Tackle Talent Gap

LONDON, September 6, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --

PA Consulting Group, in collaboration with Raspberry Pi, has challenged teams from schools, universities and businesses to utilise the Raspberry Pi, a credit card sized computer, to invent a computer programme that will benefit the world.

The teams' invention can, for example, benefit the environment, enable the delivery of better care for others or make information more readily available or secure. Winning schools will receive £1000 and undergraduates and IT professionals win a salaried internship at PA. The teams of up to six can use their programming skills and the Raspberry Pi and have a budget of £50. They can use a limited amount of additional hardware and any software modules must be available as source code.

The competition has been launched in response to a fall in programming skills and is aimed at increasing the numbers of skilled coders, developers and engineers. PA's recent report, "How to unlock sustainable growth in the UK" showed that leaders from the fastest growing technology and innovation sectors believe there are too few UK school children studying the core STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects and too few school leavers studying STEM subjects at university, meaning too few of our graduates are attracted to industry.

Alan Middleton, PA Consulting Group's Chief Executive Officer, says: "If we want to unlock growth in technology and innovation we need to support those who have a talent and passion for technology and information science. We hope this competition will help raise the level of interest and enthusiasm for computer programming amongst these groups and support the next generation of skilled programmers."

Eben Upton, Executive Director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, says: "The idea behind the Raspberry Pi came from concern about the year-on-year decline in the numbers, and skills levels, of A Level students applying to read Computer Science in each academic year. We hope that this competition will help encourage more young people and IT professionals to use the Raspberry Pi to experiment with computer programming."

For more information on the completion, visit www.paconsulting.com/raspberry-pi

Notes to the editor

About PA Consulting Group

We are a firm of more than 2,000 people, specialising in management and IT consulting, technology and innovation. Independent and employee-owned, we operate globally from offices across Europe and the Nordics, the United States, the Gulf and Asia Pacific.

We work with businesses and governments to anticipate, understand and meet the challenges they face. We have outstanding technology-development capability and a unique breadth of skills, from strategy to performance improvement, from HR to IT. Our expertise covers energy, financial services, life sciences and healthcare, government and public services, defence and security, transport and logistics, telecommunications, consumer goods and automotive.

About Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It's a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. It has been designed so that children all over the world can learn programming.

About the competition

There are five entrance categories for teams of up to six people (plus one adult mentor/coach in the first two categories):

• Years 4 - 6: 8 - 11 - Primary school
• Years 7 - 11: 12 - 16 - Pre and GCSE.
• Years 12 - 13: 16- 18 - Further education.
• Undergraduate - Higher education.
• Open - for example IT professionals.

Entrants must be UK-based for the duration of the competition and teams must register by Friday 26 October 2012.

For the first three categories, there will be one regional heat in the first weeks of March for the ten best entries in each of Scotland, Wales, Northern England / Northern Ireland, Eastern England, Southern England, and Western England.  Each regional winner from all five categories will then be invited to PA's Technology Centre in Cambridge on 20 March 2013 for the final.

An independent judging panel will include representatives from the Raspberry Pi foundation and PA Consulting Group. Entries will be scored on creativity, most random component, team passion, simplicity, world benefit and commercial potential.