By Lou DiPietro
Nearly 200 students representing high schools throughout the Northeast put their computer coding skills to the test in the annual Cornell High School Programming Contest on May 7.
In the end, the Stuyvesant Floofers, a New York City-based team, beat out 68 other teams and took home coding gold, solving the most coding problems in three hours.
First Place: Stuyvesant Floofers, including team members Maxwell Zen, Jeremy Ku-benjet, and Alvin Li
Second Place: Great Neck South Furries, including team members Alexander Xu, Leon Lian, and Luke Huang
Third Place: Primoris Academy, including team members Mythreya Dharani, Aidan Mascoli, and Ari Wachtel
“Best of Ithaca” team award: Warriors Team A, including team members Jacqueline Herrmann, Stephen Moulton, and Chad Chapman
“Best of New York City” team award: Stuyvesant Floofers
Held in-person at Cornell University’s Ithaca and Tech campuses but linked virtually via zoom, the contest drew students from New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Connecticut. The intent of the Cornell University High School Programming Contest – now in its ninth year – is to advance student learning in computer science, especially for girls and students from groups traditionally marginalized in STEM-related fields.
Participants were grouped into teams of three based on their levels of programming experience. During the contest, teaching assistants helped students recognize and solve challenging problems through traditional debugging techniques. The team that solved the most problems wins.
After the contest, students heard from guest speaker, Curran Muhlberger, a lecturer of computer science at Cornell who teaches courses on introductory programming and software engineering.
Louis DiPietro is a writer for the Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.