Team Shaker-A placed third out of 30 teams in the Advanced (Gold) Division of the recent Siena Programming Competition. This computer science contest takes place every spring for high school students. It was canceled in 2020, but held virtually last week.
Juniors Maaz Hussain, Patrick Dai, Ayaan Bargeer, and senior/President of the Coding Club Andrew Huang were put to the test for hours while they were evaluated for their programming knowledge and problem solving skills. Teams were given seven coding problems to solve in 2 hours and 30 minutes. As the time went on, the questions got progressively more difficult.
“We used different programming languages, Java and Python, to complete these programming questions,” said Patrick Dai. “Each of the problems requires some kind of algorithmic thinking and using one of the above programming languages, we would code up a solution. Each question gives some input that our code should take in and some output, which is the correct answer. Now, our job was to create a solution using code to produce that correct output within certain numerical and time constraints for each respective question,” he said.
“All four are such natural, talented programmers,” said Coding Club Advisor Carm Avellino. “They all do so much outside of the classroom to continue their learning and academic experiences and to help others. Ayaan started a tutoring mentoring program for younger students last year during the shutdown. Patrick and Maaz made video coding tutorials for our elementary students during the closure.”
Maaz and Patrick plan to run Shaker’s Coding Club next school year, while Andrew will continue his education at Caltech upon graduating.