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DSU students perform well at programming competition

Six Dakota State University students participated in a Regional Association for Computing Machinery Programming contest at Briar Cliff College in Sioux City, Iowa on November 18. The location was part of a larger distributed North Central Regional ACM Programming contest made up of 113 teams. Dakota State was represented by two teams, finishing second and third of nine teams at the regional contest and 38^th and 53^rd out of the 113 teams.

John Hastings, assistant professor of Business and Information Systems made the trip with the students and was happy with the results. “We didn’t really know what to expect,” said Hastings. “This was the first year DSU competed.”

Six Computer Science students competed on two different teams. Team A consisted of Ross Denholm, a senior from Ipswich, SD; Matt Froehlich, a senior from Parker, SD and Sam Hoo, a junior from Flandreau, SD. Eric Johnson, a junior from Mt. Vernon, SD; Kory Postma, a sophomore from Sioux Falls, SD and Daniel Sudduth, a freshman from Battle Lake, MN represented team B.

Students who compete in the competition are given a list of eight programming problems. The students must complete as many of the problems they can before time runs out. “The key to the competition is to find the absolute easiest problem first,” said Hastings. “To solve the problems, the students had to write a program that would read the data, process it and then print out the results.”

DSU competed against schools from around the region and bigger schools such as the University of Nebraska and Iowa State. Teams are given points first on how many problems they solve. Then, if two teams solve the same amount of problems, the amount of time it took decides who gets a better score. Both DSU teams completed three problems.

“The students use what they’ve learned in the classroom,” said Hastings. “There is not a lot of preparation for the competition.”

Hastings says DSU will plan to attend this event annually.