Teams from the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts performed well at two recent high school computer programming competitions, including winning first place at both events.
ASMSA swept the top three places at the Hewlett-Packard Enterprise CodeWars held March 5 in Conway. CodeWars is a programming competition for high school students. The Conway competition was one of nine held worldwide, including four others in the United States. This was the first year Conway hosted a CodeWars event.
Teams were presented 22 problems to solve during a three-hour period. Problems ranged from writing a program that would solve a Rubik’s Cube to trying to find the shortest route between two stars. Twenty-five teams participated in the competition.
The annual University of Arkansas High School Programming Contest was held on March 12. ASMSA again won first place while also taking third and fifth place. Around 140 students on 46 teams from 17 schools participated in the contest.
The University of Arkansas competition is similar to the CodeWars event. Teams worked on eight problems during a three-hour period. The problems come in pairs with one problem being easier than the other.
The winning ASMSA teams had something else in common besides being from the same school. The bulk of the first-place teams were three students. At the CodeWars event, the winning team was comprised of juniors Brock Davis, Jackson Gregory and Brandon Cox. Those three joined by a fourth junior — Joseph Sartini — for the University of Arkansas competition.
Davis, Gregory and Cox said they teamed up initially because they worked comfortably with each other. While the other two teams had a mix of juniors and seniors who had more coding experience, the members of the winning team said they had a strategy that evened the playing field for them.
During the CodeWars competition, teams were limited to using one computer. That meant only one person at a time could use the computer. The other team members were forced to work on their coding on paper while waiting their turn. While that may seem unusual, especially since you can’t test the code to see if it is correct until your turn, team members said it wasn’t a problem.
“Sometimes it’s more helpful to write up what I want to do,” Gregory said. “It’s better to write it correctly instead of having to fix errors in the first place.”
Members of the winning team also split up the problems during the CodeWars competition allowing team members to focus on their strengths. If a team member ran into a challenge with a problem, the teammates would help.
Davis said such competitions are fun because they are different than sitting in a classroom writing code for an assignment.
“It’s clearly a different environment,” Davis said. “ When I’m [at school] working, I’m like ‘Oh, I’m just coding.’ But there, I’m locked into the problems. I like the feeling of pressure. When you’re in full pressure mode, I get into a full programming zone.”
The team of junior Martin Boerwinkle and seniors William Yang and Jason Bonfanti won second place a the CodeWars event and fifth place at the University of Arkansas contest.
The team of seniors Hayden Aud, Monish Shukla and Braeden Duke finished in third place at both the CodeWars and University of Arkansas events.
Nick Seward, a computer science instructor at ASMSA, said he enjoyed watching the first-place team come together, especially during the CodeWars competition. While Cox had more experience than his teammates, he was encouraged to see how quickly they were able to pick up how the competition worked and work with each other.
“They had very little egos getting in the way. They were a well-oiled machine and just worked with each other,” Seward said.
While the competitions are fun, Seward said it’s about getting students exposure to coding more than anything.
“The more you touch it, the better you get with it,” he said. “These competitions usually aren’t going to be a direct line to a job. The average speed of a programmers is writing 25 lines of code a day. They probably wrote 300 lines or so in the competition.
“But any exposure is good exposure. And good exposure can lead to internships.”