Last week, the ITversity Belgium Campus in Gauteng Province, South Africa became the location for a unique networking event that brought together the Agoria Solar Team and ST Engineering iDirect’s local customers and partners.
The Belgium Campus is a pioneering ITversity in South Africa that helps to raise the bar in private education through its graduates in the ICT industry. The world is looking to technology for solutions to some of the most fundamental issues and problems faced today. The ITversity offers revolutionary IT qualifications to enable graduates to lead the way in providing solutions to these challenges.
The Agoria Solar Team from KU Leuven, a renowned Belgian university, arrived at Belgium Campus on 11 August and have been preparing the solar car in one of the campus’ aeroplane hangars and utilizing the facilities and office space at the ITversity to finalize their race strategy. It’s an ideal place to prepare – full of innovation. The stay at the ITversity also gives students the opportunity to tour the workshop and get to grips with the technology and gain an understanding of what it takes to prepare for this event.
It’s not the first time that KU Leuven in Belgium and the ITversity have collaborated. Representatives of KU Leuven often travel to the campus to deliver master classes.
The event, held last Wednesday, provided an ideal opportunity to invite ST Engineering iDirect’s customers and partners to the campus to learn more about the Solar Team and the race itself, and to look at how the connectivity, provided by ourselves, Intelsat and Kymeta, will work (See our recent blog).
It was great to see our customers interacting with the Solar Team. There were some interesting discussions and sharing of knowledge and experience from both perspectives. Opportunities such as this create important interactions between local businesses and educational institutions. With engineering talent in high demand, these relationships need to be nurtured.
Strategy and adventure are the key themes for this year’s event as the teams will be challenging each other to rack-up the most kilometres travelling an estimated distance of 2,500 km from the start-line in Carnival City Casino in Johannesburg to the finish line at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town.
The race also serves to highlight the importance of sustainability and the team are constantly striving to improve the efficiency of their batteries to enable them to go further and faster. Solar energy is becoming increasingly important across South Africa where the electricity grid sometimes become overwhelmed, and provides an important source of power.
So now we are looking forward to September 9 and the race start. We’d like to say a huge ‘Thank you!’ to the Belgium Campus for hosting our event. The support from the students was invaluable. We’d also like to wish the Agoria Solar Team the very best of luck for the race. We’re looking forward to keeping you connected!