NC Virtual Students Place Second in High School Computer Programming Competition

NCVPS students Cindy Gao and Daniel Hwang recently finished second in UNC Asheville’s 2017 High School Computer Programming Competition. Cindy and Daniel both take NCVPS’s AP Computer Science Principles’ course, and they represented Adrey Kell High School in the competition.

The event was sponsored by UNC Asheville and GLITCH, a First Robotics Competition (FRC) team from the university.

Nine teams and thirty-four students participated in the competition that lasted four hours. The top two teams, Panther Creek High School and Ardrey Kell High school, each solved all seven problems. The third and fourth place teams finished with six problems solved. 

This competition was structured similarly to college level programming competitions. Teams of two to four people competed to solve the most programming problems with a single machine for each team. These programming problems were solved in a variety of programming languages including Java, C, C++, Python, and more. The machines ran Windows 7 Operating System preloaded with the Java Development Kit and Integrated Development Environments for Java.

“I was interested in on-site high school programming contests, since those aren’t that popular in North Carolina,” Daniel said. “I signed up and I was planning on doing the competition individually. However, Mrs. Hamilton managed to connect me with Cindy from my school, and we just did the competition. It was fun, a relaxed Saturday, and we won something. Got a little stressed when starting the competition, but it was a competition, it’s normal. Could have gotten the last program to work, it was literally one line of code that prevented us from winning, but I’m happy about how we did and how we represented our community.”