On Saturday February 17th, UAB's Department of Computer Science hosted the 11th annual high-school programming contest. This year the contest saw a record turnout of 58 students — 11 female students and 47 male students. Students from 12 schools in north and central Alabama joined the competition:
- Altamont (Birmingham, 1 student)
- ASFA (Birmingham, 17)
- Bob Jones High School (Huntsville, 11)
- Hewitt-Trussville High School (1)
- Hoover High School (2)
- Indian Springs School (Pelham, 14)
- Jefferson County International Bacca-laureate School (Irondale, 4)
- LAMP High School (Montgomery, 1)
- Pelham High School (1)
- Tarrant High School (4)
- Vestavia High School (1)
- Weaver High School (1)
Students were divided into two sections, K11/12 and K9/10, with 32 and 26 participants respectively. In a three-hour period, students created software programs to solve eight challenging problems. Depending on the perceived difficulty of a problem, students received points for every correct solution.
After three hours of tense problem solving, Spencer Gerald Robinson won the K11/12 competition, followed by Tianyi Mao and Richard Wholbold (all three from Indian Springs School). The K9/10 section was won by Evan Krohn (Bob Jones), followed by Cole McKee (Jefferson County Inter-national Baccalaureate School), and Dylan Le (Indian Springs School). In the team competition, where the scores of the best three students from each school counted, Indian Springs came out ahead of ASFA and Bob Jones.
The contest was generously supported by Dell, HackerRank, MIT Press, Pearsons, Taylor and Francis, and UAB's Computer Science department.
