UT Dallas > Computer Science > Competition > 400 High School Students Compete in the Fall’17 Battle of the Brains: High School Programming Contest

400 High School Students Compete in the Fall’17 Battle of the Brains: High School Programming Contest

For more than a decade, the UT Dallas Computer Science Department has been conducting a statewide “Battle of the Brains: High School Programming Contest.” The contest, which follows ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) style, is held twice a year at the UT Dallas campus with UT Dallas CS professors, Drs. Ivor Page and Jey Veerasamy, overseeing the contest. UT Dallas CS students, Xander Wong, Skye Pekerti, Max Xie, Yu Hsin Chiang, Mendiola, Antonio Reuben, Jiwon Topper, Sasipreetam Morsa, Corey Wingo, Siddartha Devic, and Daniel Zhang, were also in attendance as volunteers helping with the competition.

The Fall 2017 High School Programming competition was held on October 28th, with State Farm Insurance sponsoring the event. Registration for the Fall 2017 competition was free, thanks to the sponsorship. The contest drew more than 125 teams comprising approximately 400 high school students from all over North Texas, including teams coming from top schools in the DFW Metroplex, Abilene, and Austin.

The day began at 9 am with UT Dallas CS Ph.D. students presenting research being done in the department as well as a tour of the UTDesign and Makerspace locations and opening remarks from Dr. Jey Veerasamy, Director, Center for CS Education and Outreach. The contest began at 10 AM in the morning. Subsequently, students adjourned to three separate computer labs to start the 40-minute practice portion of the contest. Immediately following was the main contest, which went for three hours. Teams of up to three high school students completed simultaneous novice and advanced contests. Every team was given the same ten problems to solve for both levels and was allowed to use only one of the UT Dallas’ lab computers.  To solve the problems, the students were allowed to use only Java 8.45 minGW C++, minGW C or Microsoft C/C++. The contest utilized PC2 (Programming Contest Control system) for semi-automatic judging.

Below is the final list of winning teams for both the advanced and novice levels.

Advanced Level WinnersNovice Level Winners
1. Plano West High School A41. Coppell Homeschool N1
2. Richardson High School A32. The School for the Talented and Gifted (TAG) N1
3. Plano West High School A13. Plano West High School N1

The following schools took part in this fall’s contest:

  • Abilene Wylie High School
  • Lovejoy High School
  • Byron Nelson High School
  • McKinney Boyd High School
  • Carroll Senior High School
  • McKinney High School
  • Centennial High School
  • Northwest High School
  • Clark High School
  • Pearce High School
  • Coppell High School
  • Plano East High School
  • Coram Deo Academy
  • Plano Senior High School
  • Frisco High School
  • Plano West High School
  • Grapevine High School
  • R. L. Paschal High School
  • Harmony School of Innovation Garland
  • Richardson High School
  • Harmony Science Academy Dallas High School
  • RL Turner High School
  • Heritage High School
  • Skyline High School
  • Independence High School
  • St. Dominic Savio Catholic School
  • Lake Travis High School
  • Stroustrup High School
  • Lebanon Trail High School
  • Texas Academy of Math and Science
  • Liberty High School
  • The Talented and Gifted School
  • Wakeland HS

The next Battle of the Brains: High School Programming Contest will be held this spring on April 7th, at the UT Dallas Computer Science Department.

Click here to view more photos from this fall’s High School Battle of the Brains Coding Contest


ABOUT THE UT DALLAS COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT

The UT Dallas Computer Science program is one of the largest Computer Science departments in the United States with over 2,400 bachelor’s-degree students, more than 1,000 master’s students, 150 Ph.D. students,  53 tenure-track faculty members and 38 full-time senior lecturers, as of Fall 2017. With The University of Texas at Dallas’ unique history of starting as a graduate institution first, the CS Department is built on a legacy of valuing innovative research and providing advanced training for software engineers and computer scientists.