This year two South Dakota college teams travelled halfway around the world for an international computer programming competition. However next year’s competition is a little closer to home.
Morocco . . . Japan . . . China . . . Sweden . . . Thailand . . . and South Dakota?
Every year the International Collegiate Programming Contest is held in a different country around the world. IBM sponsors the event. It brings together the highest level college computer programmers on earth. The competition tests the students’ skills in mathematics and coding to solve problems. The team that solves the most problems in the allotted time wins.
Teams advance through various regional meets and then gather at the World Finals. In May 20-16 the ICPC was held in Phuket, Thailand. Teams from the University of South Dakota and South Dakota Schools of Mines both made their way to the finals this year.
Ed Corwin is a professor at the School of Mines and coaches their programming team with Professor Toni Logar.
“128 teams from around the world, 20 or 21 from North America and 2 of them were from South Dakota. We should be awfully proud of that fact. Again 20 teams are there from the United States and Canada. If you start listing off the top technological schools in the United States, I think you’d find that you could think of 20 more prestigious sounding universities than USD and the School of Mines. And we still wound up in the top 20 in North America to go to the world finals,” says Corwin.
The South Dakota teams didn’t place at the finals, but the coaches say both teams performed well. Now the focus is on the 20-17 ICPC which takes place in Rapid City. Dick Gowen is the president of the group “Excellence through Technology”. The group is organizing the Rapid City event.
Gowen says the sheer logistics of hosting a competition like this are daunting. And despite all this . . . Professor Corwin and Professor Logar are focusing on coaching next year’s team. After all . . . Logar says there’s no such thing as a free pass.
“Just because Rapid City is hosting the World Finals in 2017, doesn’t mean that the School of Mines automatically gets a place at the World Finals. All spots at the World Finals are earned and so you asked if there’s extra pressure. Oh yes, we so desperately want to have a team at the world finals in 2017 so we are trying very hard to ramp up our game, even more for this coming year,” says Logar.
Logar says this contest is the Olympics of computer programming. She hopes bringing the competition to South Dakota inspires more students to pursue computer programming.