Five of Southern Lehigh’s computer science students programmed their way to second place in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) competition, which took place on November 5.

”In terms of the competition, it was the first time all of us had ever done anything like that,” junior Joshua Wentling said. “We had all done or taken a few computer science courses before that, so we’re relatively new to competitions.”

The goal of the ACM contest was to provide an opportunity for like-minded individuals to collaborate as a team and have an enjoyable experience. In the competition, teams had to write a source code of computer programs which had to be able to solve real-world problems; time also came into play if not all the answers were correct. The problems they had to solve went from making a program that could calculate miles per hour to creating a program that would be able to produce a cross-word puzzle from the touch of a button.

“The practice problems that they handed out were pretty hard, and I thought we were gonna get crushed because it was our first time doing it,” junior Daniel Qian said.

Southern Lehigh’s team finished within an hour and forty minutes – which is actually a pretty fast time – and the winning team, Emmaus, finished one minute before them. The students who competed in this competition were senior Dominick Rubino, juniors Mindy Wen, Daniel Qian, and Joshua Wentling, and sophomore Ben Zalatan. Also competing were eleven other high school teams, including Easton, Freedom, Delaware Valley, Emmaus, and Bethlehem Catholic.

“It was fun because you get to competitively program and go up against other people that are also good at programming,” Zalatan said.

Although there are no more competitions planned for the computer science classes, this year they signed up for the American Computer Science League (ACSL). The ACSL organizes computer science contests and computer programming contests for junior and senior high school students.

“I think it was a good, fun experience,” senior Dominick Rubino said. “It was definitely interesting; I’ve never done anything like that before.