Mastering the Mainframe

Interview With Micheal Todd of IBM's System z Academic Initiative

Nov 1, 2009

Master the Mainframe 2009, a contest sponsored by IBM's Academic Initiative teaches students basic mainframe skills that will help them in today's competitive job market.

Master the Mainframe is a yearly contest that "gives students some familiarity with concepts that would make them more marketable to our customers," said Micheal Todd of IBM's System z Academic Initiative in a phone interview with him on Monday, October 26, 2009. The contest consists of 3 parts, each with increasingly difficult tasks that challenge students while also teaching them important mainframe skills that they can use to get an edge when they apply for jobs. All of the tasks in this contest are "based on direct feedback that we have from IBM's customers and skills that they were looking for in students that were coming out of high school and coming out of college."

What is Master the Mainframe?

Micheal Todd explains Master the Mainframe: "So back in 2005, the IBM Academic Initiative for System z, the program that I am working for, started talking about ways that we could reach out directly to students. My program offers course materials and curriculum to schools worldwide and we also offer free mainframe access to professors and their students and even to high school teachers and their students. The contest is one way we thought of to reach out to students directly and give them a chance to use the mainframe on their own.

So in 2005 in the US and Canada, the fall semester was the first time we ran this contest and we had 700 students join and then this year we have 2800 students enrolled so far. That's not a final number, registration stays open through November, but that's where we are right now. It's really nice to see that growth, we have a thousand more students than we has sign up last year, and a lot more high school students; it's really nice to have high schoolers involved as well.

IBM and my program also help international teams run some very similar contests. They don't always call it 'Master the Mainframe Contest;' it has also been called the 'Student Mainframe Contest' in some countries. Right now this contest is also running in Russia and Taiwan, the United Kingdom and it's slated to start in about a month here in Brazil; this will be the third time that Brazil has run the contest. It really has become sort of an international event now, and it's something that we look forward to continue growing."

Master the Mainframe Tasks

The Master the Mainframe 2009 contest consists of three parts, each one increasingly difficult than the last. In Part 1 students are guided through simple tasks by looking at screenshots and reading detailed instructions to get the job done. They learn the basic skills needed to work with a mainframe, like how to connect to it and how to create and edit datasets on the mainframe.

After students complete Part 1, they move onto Part 2 where the tasks emulate real world situations that students might have to deal with when working with mainframes. Micheal Todd says "In Part 2, we have a little background section to explain to students for each task why they would be interested to know these things. Like why would they want to know about COBOL programming, why would they want to know how to fix a JCL error; ... those little background sections at the beginning of each of the Part 2 tasks give students a little bit of context for the technical challenges that they're tackling."

All of the challenges in the beginning of Part 2 range from something as simple as searching through a dataset to find a specific sentence, all the way up to editing programs written in JCL, C, and Java that perform complex tasks on the mainframe.

Once students complete Part 2, they move onto part 3 where, according to the Master the Mainframe website, students will be "tackling issues that occur in real-world IT shops." These in-depth tasks will give students the necessary skills they need to work with real-world mainframe systems and be successful at it.

Incentives to Enter the Contest

Besides the fact that students will get a competitive edge over others in the job market and some extra skills to help them if they choose a career working with mainframes, IBM gets students to participate in this contest by offering some very nice prizes.

The first 1000 contestants to finish Part 1 100% correctly receive a free Master the Mainframe 2009 T-Shirt, and the 50 schools with the most eligible registrants will have their hometowns listed on the back of the shirt in the style of a concert shirt with tour dates on the back.

The first 60 contestants to finish Part 2 100% correctly receive another, more valuable prize consisting of a $100 pre-paid Visa debit card, a certificate from IBM, and an invitation to put their resumes in the Student Opportunity Database, "a popular recruiting tool accessible to all of IBM's clients and business partners."

Finally, the 5 students who successfully complete the most tasks in Part 3 of the contest get to choose between a Samsung 22" LCD HDTV or a Lenovo S10-2 netbook computer. The top 3 students in the contest will also receive a two-day all expenses-paid trip to the IBM Mainframe lab in Poughkeepsie, NY.

For more information about Master the Mainframe 2009, or to enter, be sure to check out the Master the Mainframe 2009 website.

The copyright of the article Mastering the Mainframe in High School is owned by Nicholas Anderegg. Permission to republish Mastering the Mainframe in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.