| Date of the competition:
Friday, March 2, 2007 For the past eightteen years St. Bonaventure University's Computer Science Department has hosted a programming contest for high school
students. Originally the contest attracted schools in Western New York and Northwestern Pennsylvania.
The last several years the contest has brought in teams from a wider area. In addition to schools from Buffalo, Rochester, Ithaca, Pittsburgh, and Erie, schools from
Ohio, Delaware, Virginia, and Maryland have participated. The contest provides an opportunity for students to demonstrate their programming skills
in a competitive environment. The contest will be held on the St. Bonaventure University campus on
a Friday, March 2. This date has been chosen
after after consulting participating schools regarding their winter
break schedules.
Each team must be accompanied by a faculty advisor from their school. St. Bonaventure University covers the cost of all materials and meals. The only cost to participating schools is transportation to and from the campus. Participation is restricted to
30 teams and participants
are selected on a first-come, first-served basis. Teams must register
for the contest by January 26. Schools will be sent more detailed
information regarding the computer facilities, contest rules, and sample
contest problems once they have registered.
Check-in for the teams begins at 8:00 a.m. and the orientation begins at 8:45 a.m. The final awards presentation will be completed by 2:00 p.m. Team awards will be presented to the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place teams. A large "traveling" trophy, donated by Metrowerks, can be kept for one year by the team that finishes first.
Union-Endicott High School, Endicott, NY, took this trophy last year and will be returning it for this contest. The contest is conducted in computer laboratories located on campus. All the laboratories contain Windows XP-based personal computers that are linked by a campus-wide local area network. Teams use the network to submit their programs.
A team consists of no more than four students from the same high school. Students may only program in C++ or Java. Each team receives the same collection of 6-8 problems. Scoring is based on how quickly each team submits correct solutions.
The Eclipse development environment is used for both Java and C++.
The programming environment is pre-configured with the projects for the
problems so that minimal knowledge of the Eclipse environment is
required of the student programmers. A professional development workshop is conducted during the contest for faculty advisors. The topics covered in the workshop varies from year to year.
Last year Paul Tymann from Rochester Institute of Technology talked
about the important changes in Java 5.0.
Most of
the contest problems require a team to write a complete program that
meets given specifications. Some of
the contest problems will require the students to write a program that
uses a pre-defined class that we will provide at the time of the
contest. (Problems of this type have appeared in the contest the last
several years.) Instructions for practicing with class-based problems
are available at the contest web site.
This year,
a new type
of problem will be introduced. This new type of problem is
designed to emphasize the importance of complete testing when writing
programs. More specifically, these testing-based problems will present
students with a specification written in the same format as more
traditional problems. The students will also be presented with a web page that
features an applet that runs a partially correct solution to the
problem. It is up to the team to find an input data set such that the
program on the web page does NOT generate the correct answer for their
input. Teams are responsible for providing the correct answer for that
input data as well. Some
sample testing-based problems
are now available.
For additional information, please contact:
Dr. Steven K. Andrianoff, Contest Director
Department of Computer Science
St. Bonaventure University
St. Bonaventure, NY 14778
Phone: (716) 375-2053
FAX: (716) 375-7618
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