Computing students win big at international programming competition

Janel Shoun-Smith | 12/18/2015

Competition skills help students get ahead of the game in internships and grad school admissions

Nine of Lipscomb’s computing and technology students turned in their best performance ever, beating out universities like the University Tennessee-Knoxville and Tennessee Technological University, at the annual ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition, held this past November.

Specially selected and prepped computing students traveled to Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, Tennessee, to compete in the worldwide competition, where students take on eight complex, real-world computing problems within a five-hour time limit.

Students Tate Burns, Harrison Miller and Christopher Hebert placed third out of the 25 teams gathered at TTU, and 30^th out of the 146 teams in the Association for Computing Machinery’s midcentral region. The team solved four of nine problems.

“This year's competition included some problems that were quite involved, such as verifying a primitive encryption method that hides a password in a message string, or simulating the collisions of a series of droplets, and other problems that literally take multiple pages to explain,” said Hebert, a junior computer science major from Spring Hill, Tennessee.

Two other Lipscomb teams also performed well in the contest. Gregory Araujo, Abdulhafiz Alawi and Connor Austin placed 5th at the TTU site and 47th in the midcentral region. Austin Humphreys, Zach Zeiger and Nate Hamilton placed 7th at the TTU site and 54th for the midcentral region.

These two teams each solved three out of nine problems, and outranked universities such as Middle Tennessee State University, Belmont University and one team from Vanderbilt University.

The ACM programming contest fosters creativity, teamwork and innovation in building new software programs, and enables students to test their ability to perform under pressure. Teammates collaborate to rank the difficulty of the problems, deduce the requirements, design test beds and build software systems that solve the problems. Solutions require precision, knowledge and understanding of advanced algorithms.

The competition is valuable to students in helping them to develop the superior skills needed to land quality internships and get into the top graduate schools, said Eddy Borera, assistant professor and faculty coordinator for the ACM programming teams.

“When you solve these problems at the competition, you have to solve them really fast, so you have to be efficient,” Borera said. “These are skills they can really use in their next venture in industry, such as creating software, or moving on to graduate school.”

“The competition poses puzzles requiring the use of concepts we learn in our classes such as data structures, algorithms and time complexity, so they reinforce all those concepts,” said Hebert. “The practice of solving code puzzles quickly and efficiently has also proven useful in technical interviews for internships, which often involves a whiteboard, a dry-erase marker and an interviewer with an open ended code problem.”

The College of Computing & Technology holds organized practices for students interested in competing, and then holds its own programming competition to select the final competitors, Borera said. The college also holds a competition programming academic course in the spring semester for students interested in refining their skills.

“We have grown as a college and we have a top-quality program now, and these results reflect that,” Borera said.

The College of Computing & Technology was established as a college in August 2014, and a new cutting-edge office and learning space was opened in January 2015.

“This space has been very good for us, because they are not only learning computing, but they are also learning to collaborate by using this space,” Borera said. “Students are meeting in here to work on projects such as developing software for a new company. That is common these days.”

“This competition introduced me to some programming techniques, but arguably the most important part is learning how to work and communicate with a partner on a piece of code and how to identify scenarios in which certain techniques should be used,” said Hebert.

The world finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition will be held in May 2016 in Thailand. Borera expects Lipscomb’s students to rank even higher next year and to someday be among the national finalists.