High school students sharpen skills in VCU School of Engineering's first computer programming contest

By Mike Frontiero
VCU School of Education

The next generation of computer programmers gathered around a sea of computer terminals in Virginia Commonwealth University's School of Engineering for the school's first ever high school computer programming contest. Thirteen teams from Richmond area high schools participated in the three-hour contest to see which team could solve the most computer programming problems in the time allowed.

The top three teams won Circuit City gift certificates. First and second place went to two teams from Chesterfield County. Each member of the teams won $100 and $50 respectively. Twenty-five dollar gift certificates were awarded to each member of a Hanover County team, which placed third.

The new competition was sponsored by the Department of Computer Science, which plans to hold the event annually. "This is a challenging and fun opportunity for these students to improve their Java programming language skills," said department chairman James E. Ames, Ph.D. "It is designed to encourage the development of creative problem solving and communication skills as students work with their teammates to generate solutions to programming problems."

Many associate professors in the department played key roles in the contest: Lorraine M. Parker, Ph.D., David Primeaux, Ph.D., and Ju Wang, Ph.D. organized the competition; Branson W. Murrill, Ph.D. served as contest monitor; Chao-Kun Cheng was in charge of grading problems; and Susan S. Brilliant handled student registration. Event activities were coordinated by Program Support Technician L. Hazel Mays, and breakfast for the participants was hosted by the VCU Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery.