Students Advance to International Computer Programming Contest

A team of student computer programmers from Illinois State University’s School of Information Technology will be competing against university teams from around the globe in an international computer programming competition, April 6-10 in Banff, Canada.

The School of Information Technology team is one of 20 university teams from the United States to advance from regional competitions to the World Finals of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) International Collegiate Programming Contest, hosted by the University of Alberta. 

Worldwide, more than 7,000 teams representing more than 1,700 universities competed in regional contests.  In all, 90 teams from across the world have advanced to the World Finals, which challenges students to solve complex computer programming problems.

Illinois State’s team, Rocky Theme Song, is composed of computer science majors Nathan Fleming, Belvidere; Jason Eilts, Pontiac; and Kelly Doran, Mt. Prospect.  The team is coached by Mary Goodwin, instructional assistant professor in the School of Information Technology.  The team placed second out of 120 teams in a five-state regional competition to advance to the World Finals.

During the World Finals, teams of three students are given a set of eight or more complex, realistic computer programming challenges to solve in a five hour period.  Team members are given one computer and must use their programming and logic skills to define the problems and develop software systems to solve them. 

“All four teams from the School of Information Technology finished in the top fifty percent after the Midwest regional competition, but this team's score is in the top one percent of all the teams that entered from around the world,” said Terry Dennis, director of the School of Information Technology. “That's an outstanding accomplishment and we are all proud of Nathan, Jason and Kelly.”