The College of Charleston is hosting nearly 1,000 top high school students for two competitions in one weekend. The 30th annual High School Computer Programming Competition will be held Friday February 24 and the 35th annual Math Meet will be on Saturday, February 25. 

The Student Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is producing the computer science competition, which will be held in the JC Long Building (9 Liberty Street) from 4:30 to 9:30 p.m. Using Python 3 programming language, student teams will solve three programming assignments. Each year, there are typically 15 teams with no more than three students per team representing high schools from South Carolina and North Carolina. Participating students will hear from John Smith, chief technology officer of SPARC.

The Math Meet, hosted by the Department of Mathematics, will be held at various locations on the College of Charleston campus from 8:45 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. More than 700 students come from across the Southeast to participate in the Math Meet and this year there will be several major changes based on survey results from last year’s participants. The Timed Sprints will feature a fixed amount of time to answer a series of questions. Also, the Brainstorm will be held with all teams in one large room, instead of separating into smaller rooms.

“The Math Meet has a reputation among teachers and high school students for being one of the most entertaining and rewarding events of its kind,” says Alex Kasman, Math Meet organizer and professor of mathematics. “We pride ourselves on the fact that there are many high school math competitions run by colleges and universities, but many of our participants insist ours is the best. We will continue to make improvements to maintain this standing.”

For the first time this year, the South Carolina Stingrays sponsored an online competition for three South Carolina high schools. Teams from Charleston Charter School for Science and Math, Clover High School, and Stratford High School answer hockey-themed questions in a timed competition. Charleston Charter School for Math and Science won recognition and tickets to a Stingrays hockey game.

The computer science competition has also made changes for 2012.

“This year, the College of Charleston student chapter of ACM marks the sixth year of our new competition paradigm,” says Paul Anderson, ACM faculty adviser and computer science professor. “The state of the practice and the state of education in software engineering emphasize quality. Consequently, the new approach focuses on the quality of the submissions from the competing teams and removes the fastest-to-complete constraint entirely. We focus on both technical quality and artistic quality.”

The ACM event is sponsored by the College of Charleston’s Department of Computer Science, Hawkes Learning Systems, and Google.

More information about the High School Computer Programming Competition or contact ACM Faculty Advisor Dr. Paul Anderson at andersonp@cs.cofc.edu or 843.953.8151.

More information about the Math Meet or contact Dr. Alex Kasman at kasmana@cofc.edu or 843.953.8018.