Mountain Lake Public High School’s computer programming team rapidly becoming a small schools dynasty
The names of the team members might change from year-to-year, but the fact remains the same – Mountain Lake Public High School’s (MLHS) computer programming team is rapidly becoming a small schools dynasty in the University of South Dakota-Vemillion’s (USD) Association for Computing Machinery High School Programming Contest. Continuing the tradition with a first-place finish in the small schools’ Division II high school computer programming contest were juniors Daniel Harder and Reece Englund. Daniel was also a member of last year’s MLHS first-place team, along with his cousin, Aron Harder, a 2013 MLHS grad. The team is coached by Jon Harder, Mountain Lake Public School’s technology coordinator. This year’s contest was held on the USD campus on Thursday morning and afternoon, April 10. Since 2010 – the first year a local team has competed in the contest – MLHS has finished either first or second: * 2014 – First * 2013 – First (finished all problems within two hours) * 2012 – Second * 2011 – First * 2010 – Fourth This year, teams came from schools from Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota compete in this contest. Mountain Lake was the only Minnesota team this year. Schools are divided by size, into a large school division and a small school division. Teams consist of one, two or three students. Teams are given a set of 12 problems to solve using the computer programming language of their choice. Many teams use Visual Basic, C/C++/C# or Java language, but Mountain Lake uses Ruby because, as Jon Harder explains, “It is good at expressing complex ideas in a simple way.” Teams have exactly four hours to solve as many problems as possible. There are typically enough difficult problems in the set so that no team can finish in that amount of time. The winner is the team that solves the most problems. If there is a tie, then the team that solves them in the least amount of accumulated time wins. Because of this rule, the strategy is to determine which problems can be done the most quickly and solve those first. This year, no team solved more than eight problems of the approximately 10 problems they were given. Mountain Lake solved eight problems in about half the accumulated time of an Omaha team – the Division I winner – that also solved eight. Even though MLHS competes in the small school division, the team has consistently done better than the best team in the large school division. For the first time MLHS was awarded a prize as the team scoring higher than any school in either division. In Division II, Western Christian High School of Hull, Iowa, finished in second behind MLHS, while O’Gorman Catholic High School of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, was third. Topping Division I participating schools was the team from Omaha Public Schools North, while Washington Public High School’s (Sioux Falls) Team B was second, followed by that school’s Team A.
