According to the most recent Brainbench reports, Romania is positioned fifth out of 217 countries worldwide in terms of ITC expertise, after the USA, India, Russia, and Ukraine. MATERNA's contribution to the infoEducatie contest is part of the local and regional company strategy of supporting the educational environment and investing in the tuition of young Romanian IT specialists. The company intends to further develop a series of various educational and training projects at the local and regional level throughout 2009 and 2010.

This edition of the InfoEducatie contest took place 04-10 August 2009 at the Galaciuc camp in the Vrancea Mountains. Structured in three sections - utility software, educational software, and web pages - the contest gathered high school students with software development skills and backgrounds in informatics from all over the country, but not only.

"We're already at the sixteenth edition of the event, and we've grown each year. This wouldn't have happened without the support of major ITC players like Materna Information & Communications", said Professor Emil Onea, project coordinator at InfoEducatie 2009. "It also gives me great pleasure to say we're proud of our past contestants who are now employed in some of the biggest local and international software companies".

In the final stage of the competition, there was an open contest for teams. In no more than 24 hours, the teams had to develop a complex software application on a given theme. Their work had to combine planning, programming, and design, and the competitors were able to use any online source of information or even ask for the advice of outsiders.

"It's very important that we support and invest in the practical training of those who will be our future specialists. It's well known that the Romanian programmers are among the best in the world. In order to keep Romania among the top countries with the best specialists, it's extremely important that Romanian IT companies along with the educational institutions contribute in organizing programs and competitions that develop the practical skills of the young ones.

These programs give the best education to our students for the requirements of the ICT market. I'm impressed by the innovative spirit of the competitors at InfoEducatie 2009 as well as by the projects they developed. I congratulate the organizers and the fact that in just a few days, they managed to create such a tight community", said Andrei Grosu, responsible for IT solutions for MATERNA Information & Communications Romania's public sector solutions.

Over 200 contestants, including professors and students from around the whole country, took part in this year's InfoEducatie, where the awards were made for various categories. The winning projects for the Educational Software category - 31 works were presented in this section - were Virtual Lessons (first prize), LearnGraphs (second prize), Interactive English (third prize), The Byzantine Empire (mention), Composed Sentences (mention), and InfoCenter (mention).