Students square off in annual high school programming contest
On Saturday, February 15th, sixteen teams of high school students from across the Rio Grande Valley gathered at UTRGV for the annual High School Programming Contest. At the end of the day, among the top five teams who were recognized as victorious, four were drawn from students of STC’s own dual enrollment computer science classrooms!
Hosted by UTRGV Computer Science Department faculty member Gustavo Dietrich, the annual competition is an exhibition of problem-solving prowess, programming skills, and time management. Students are tasked with tackling ten programming challenges of increasing complexity in a period of only two hours and are awarded points for each solution that successfully solves a previously unseen judges’ set of input data. This year’s challenges included problems such as writing programs to identify triangles given triples of side lengths, and calculating a user’s cell phone bill based on daily usage data.
At the end of the day, despite many of them competing for the first time against veteran teams, the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th place spots were filled with teams of students pulled from the classrooms of Computer Science department faculty members Ernesto Gonzalez at Sharyland HS, Jose Jaramillo at Sharyland Pioneer HS, and Lucian Silcox and Nicolas Gutierrez at the STC Pecan campus. The first place spot went to the team from Edinburg North HS, sponsored by Miguel Ramirez, with a stunning performance! Congratulations to all of these amazingly talented students, and to our faculty for helping to train them.