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K-State Today

October 27, 2014

Student teams tackle computer programming problems for prizes

Submitted by Mary Rankin

Thirty-five teams, totaling 91 student participants, competed in a programming contest hosted by the K-State chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery Oct. 18 in Nichols Hall. Open to K-State students of all majors, teams spent five hours attacking 10 programming problems of varying degrees of difficulty.

Sponsors, who provided funding for nearly $3,000 in prizes, included Koch Industries, TradeBot, Garmin and ConocoPhillips. Representatives from the companies also were on hand to talk with students during breaks in the competition.

Members of the winning team, Donovan Mitchell and Daniel Jones, both computer science majors; and Kevin Carr, physics, each took home a 48-inch Vizio LCD television after solving four problems. The second and third place teams, respectively, were Mike McCall, Jake Ehrlich and Ryan Sutton, all computer science; and Blake Martin, computer engineering, Trent Novelly, computer science, and Henry Haake, open option.

Members of the top four teams also received a guaranteed financial aid offer from the computing and information sciences department in the College of Engineering worth more than $50,000, if they choose to continue their studies in the computing and information sciences doctoral program.

Top freshmen-only team members, Matthew Weis, Matthew Wilderson and Ryan Kruse; and sophomore-only team members, Arunothayan Paramanathan and Christian Hughes, all computer science majors, each received a $600 scholarship sponsored by Koch Industries.

"The K-State ACM chapter is already hard at work planning events for the next semester," said Dan Andresen, associate professor of computing and information sciences and faculty advisory for the chapter. "This includes another programming contest tentatively scheduled for Feb. 28."

Read more about upcoming Association for Computing Machinery events.