The New Zealand Programming contest ran on Saturday 11th of September as an online event just one week after our second lockdown ended. Burnside teams got together at our own school with four teams coming to use the school lab.

The national event had 32 High school teams from all over NZ and a similar number of Tertiary student teams competing with the same problems at the same time.

Burnside’s top team “steve++” consisting of Nicholas Grace, Isaac Siu and Hanan Fokkens came first place in the High School grade with 342 points; an awesome total, managing to answer all but one of the increasingly complex questions in the 5 hour competition.

This is Burnsides 2nd year in a row winning the competition and we’re continuing to develop a strong tradition of success.

The other teams from Burnside had some success also with a team consisting of year 12 programmers coming in 4th overall. “Steven Script”, who were leading earlier in the competition scored really highly and students Matthew Mercer, Jacky Zhang and Tim Fisher-Taylor should be very pleased with their final result.

Grady Kenix competed as a solo programmer ending up in 23rd place,another impressive result considering he had to answer all the questions himself and Ricky Chen and Shivam Shankar, two year 10 students had a great showing, ending up in 19th place in the first ever NZ Programming Contest.

The programming club has lots more students in training for these teams and we are looking forward to continued success in competitive programming in the following years.