By Alexandre Garrido Iglesias, Staff Writer

This past Friday, the Armstrong campus gave its technology students a chance to shine and show their skills in the Annual Armstrong Techfest 2018. There, they had to present a project (individually or in groups) related in some way or another with, well, Technology (yeah, they didn’t crack their heads with the name of the event).

Where the event seems like a classic competition from high school, it actually had high level projects where the main topic was cyber security and privacy in transactions on internet level, but also projects related with music and video games.

But the event was not like The Fight Club (remember rule number one), because the participants had to stick to these rules:

• It must cover subjects in computer science, information technology, or engineering
• The posters must not exceed 36 inches in height and 48 inches in width and should be mounted on foam board with an adhesive
• All posters should be electronically printed
• Demonstrations must be accompanied by a visual component
• Documentation such as reports or code may be used to supplement a poster or demonstration, but such documentation should not be used as the primary visual component
• During the scheduled posters and demonstrations session, at least one student per entry must be readily available to orally explain their project and answer questions for visitors
• Oral presentations should not exceed five minutes for each set of visitors

The winner presented a project related with VR, a sector that is rising in video gaming, but it has several problems, like the fact that a lot of people felt real dizzy when they tried this system. That’s exactly the problem that the winner faced and was resolved with a new system that guides the user in a way that helped them to not feel sick.

In an incredible turn of events, there was a tie for second place, one of the projects was on how to introduce the design and build of technologies to the children, and another one allows the users to maintain anonymity while they are making transactions in the internet.

The third podium was a project designed to improve technological cryptography with a revolutionary algorithm that allows the secret send of messages, without needing a key to encrypt them.

This year’s event proves that this campus has a lot to offer in the technological field and a bright future ahead of it.