On August 30, Ukrainian developer team Turbo Rocket Games won Google’s 2016 AdMob Student App Challenge with its online animal simulator game Dragon Sim Online.
The winning team consists of just four members — Vladimir Duchenchuk, Serhii Dotsenko, Yaroslava Girilishena and Iliya Bakurov, — who are students or graduates from National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.
Over 100 student teams from around the world competed to build the best app and monetize it using AdMob. The winner is entitled to a trip to San Francisco, including a visit to the Googleplex.
Dragon Sim Online has already been downloaded over 500,000 times worldwide with an average review of 4.5 stars.
Among the best developers in the world
Meanwhile, HackerRank, an international platform that ranks engineers based on their coding skills and helps companies discover talent faster, released a ranking of 50 countries which are home for the best developers.
Ukraine ranked 11th, behind China, Russia, Poland, Switzerland, France and Italy — but far ahead of the United States, the UK, India and Israel.
In separate categories, Ukrainian professionals beat out the competition in security, while making it to the top five in such domains as mathematics and distributed systems.
Attracting hundreds of thousands of developers from all over the world, these challenges involved a variety of languages and knowledge domains, from Python to algorithms to security to distributed systems. Developers were scored and ranked based on a combination of their accuracy and speed.
Sources: AdMob Google blog, HackerRank, AIN.UA (1,2)
