JRMPC 2020 Awards Ceremony

JRMPC, or The James Robertson Memorial Programming Competition, is a national contest open to Canadian high school students. It was completed on March 6, 2020 and the awards ceremony was scheduled for April 18.

Here is the awards ceremony video for JRMPC 2020:

I hope you enjoyed it. This video represents the culmination of eighteen months of hard work on the competition. It also nicely caps off a five-year advocacy campaign for the Smalltalk programming language.

Here are close-ups of the trophy awards…

First Prize:

Second Prize:

Third Prize:

Presentation Box:

For more details about the competition, read “JRMPC 2020 Award Winners.”

A note about the JRMPC operational website, teams.jrmpc.ca. It was created using the Teapot web framework and Pharo, a modern derivative of Smalltalk released in 2008. Teapot is a lightweight framework for those situations where the full industrial strength of Seaside is not required. Teapot and Seaside, as well as PharoJS (which transpiles to JavaScript), make Pharo totally web-ready for the twenty-first century.

I would like to thank the following people profusely for their contributions to JRMPC and this video:

• Vance Kershner, CEO of LabWare, who fully funded this competition.
• Leandro Caniglia, President of FAST (Fundación Argentina de Smalltalk), who invited me to speak at the Smalltalks 2018 conference in Salta, Argentina. Without him, JRMPC would never have been funded.
• Ben Coman for developing the JRMPC Organiser software. In particular, I appreciate the spectacular competition map that Ben created for the final round of the competition. You can see it in the feature image above for this post.
• Bob Nemec, Organizer of TSUG (Toronto Smalltalk User Group), for being my Master of Ceremonies.
• Robert Eng for providing the beautiful graphic animations produced with Blender.
• My wife, Ann Liu, for helping with the photography.
• FXHOME for the HitFilm Express video editor that made my job much easier than I could’ve imagined.
• Norman Branitsky for introducing me to Smalltalk over a dozen years ago. Without him, I would never have begun my Smalltalk journey.
• Ron Teitelbaum, CEO of 3D ICC, for allowing me to use their website graphics.
• Alan Kay, Kent Beck, and Norm Green, Senior VP of GemTalk Systems, for supporting the competition.

Smalltalk is a true marvel of the software engineering world. It is renowned for its simplicity, scalability, productivity, and versatility. Smalltalk has been used for practically everything, from teaching programming to young people all the way up to massively complex software systems that are highly scalable and maintainable. For this reason, Smalltalk is a favourite in the enterprise market.

It is my wish that the JRMPC competition will inspire you to try Smalltalk programming. Discover the wonders of one of the greatest programming languages in history.