As part of their outstanding winning app design and presentation in the national competition for Switzerland, team Ovarium were invited to collect their trophies from the AWS head offices in Zurich (Amazon Web Services – ZRH15, Mythenquai 10, 8002 Zürich).
During their visit, team Ovarium received a guided tour of the offices and completed several workshops, one of which looked at the UN sustainability goals and how to build a cloud connected self-watering plant using IOT (internet of things) hardware kits. They had to write code to program various sensors to measure moisture levels in the soil, which would then activate a water pump to water the plants remotely.
The AWS representative who spent the day with team Ovarium was Alessandra Pasini, who is a Solutions Architect at AWS. She was very impressed with team Ovarium and even offered to help them with their app development process in the future.
Team Ovarium enjoyed the tour of the office as much as the coding workshop. Seeing such a modern and creative work environment, with nap rooms and sound proof booths, left them feeling very excited about working in such an environment:
“I got to learn a lot more about coding in particular and it was cool to try some new stuff with this. We did have a flooding situation due to some coding bugs but it was really cool to experiment ”
“The workshops were great because they gave us a real beginners guide. I thought it would be so confusing but it really made sense and helped to think about how to improve our coding”.
“The person working with us really gave easy to follow instructions and explained each step in a way we could understand. We even talked about her helping to develop our app event more”.
“She gave us some great advice. Go to companies with our app, which we have already started to do. She then said we should see what everyone can offer to see what the options are before choosing which way to go to develop our app”.
“The office was so cool and everything was so interactive. We all got to learn something and it wasn’t just about sitting and listening to a presentation but getting involved”.
“They looked after us so well. They gave us food and drink and let us try the focus booths which were amazing. They were so comfy and you had space for all of your things, they were so good”.
