City Colleges’ Computer Science Programming team sat patiently in a big laboratory at Riverside Community College. The Association for Computing Machinery’s Intercollegiate Programming Contest was about to begin.
SBCC Team One trained for six weeks and created goals for the competition. Their goals were to beat UCSB, beat SBCC’s Intercollegiate Programming Contest record and to be the best of all community colleges. They accomplished all three goals.
The all day event was held on Saturday, Nov. 9 and started with an orientation and then the competition. The City College team of 3 boys was made up of Joel Green, Erwan Lent and Benjamin Rhoda. The team placed 14th out of 91, which beat the school record.
“This was a special experience. You know, I’ve got my classes that I teach and I’ve got the students that I get along with, but this is a really special event and I had a lot of fun!” said Professor and Coach of SBCC Team One, Stephen Strenn.
The competition begins with questions that the judges are sure everyone will get right. Then, the questions get tougher to weed out teams.
The teams are not allowed any access to the Internet for answers, so they have to bring in printed computer knowledge, such as geometric formula. Math skills are a big part of the competition.
“We got the results during the competition about 45 minutes after we’d submit a problem,” Benjamin Rhoda, SBCC Team One member said. “We were mostly hoping that our solution was correct, but every time I looked at the scoreboard I was happy we were so high up on it.”
The computers they worked on were slow, many glitches got in their way. Once the competition began it took 10 minutes for Firefox to open.
“The lag only made it possible for us to have four problems successfully submitted,” said Green. “We had two additional problems that needed only a few minor changes to submit but the lag made that impossible.”
None of the members had ever competed in this competition, which hosted the best in the south west. While 14th place is far from first, Lent isn’t too disappointed with their standing.
Schools that beat SBCC were Cal-Tech, Harvey Mudd, UCLA, and USC that are all top ranking computer science universities.
The two top teams are going to Russia to compete in the global competition, they are from UCI and USC.
Joel Green, 21, has participated in contests such as the Facebook Hackathon, which he says he did quite well in. He is hoping to transfer next fall.
Erwan Lent, 18, works at UCSB as an application developer and has his own software business. He is also working on a weather balloon that will go up into space. He has never competed in this event but says he will again next year, along with the other programming competitions he likes to enter on his free time.
Green and Lent are both Computer Science majors.
Benjamin Rhoda, 17, is the youngest and still in high school. He has not been to this competition before, but has competed in two cyber security competitions and a few other programming competitions online.
Stephen Strenn, chair of computer science, was the adviser for Team One. This was his second round at the competition and he absolutely loved it.
“These guys did really well, as I kind of expected, because these guys are sharp,” said Strenn. “No doubt about it.”
