Burnside High School student Jacky Zhang wins a gripping contest at the University of Canterbury.

More than seventy of Canterbury's top high school programmers competed in a grueling four hour programming competition on Saturday 2nd of July. Around ten schools sent their best and brightest to the competition this year, that has grown from strength to strength and become a regular fixture on the digital technology calendar.

Jacky Zhang, competing on his own, won the competition in spectacular fashion. Not only did he manage to answer all the questions, a feat which no other team managed, but he finished with an hour to spare. This was made even more impressive as his Python solution for a couple of the hardest questions ran too slowly so he re-wrote them in C++ in order to pass the tests.

Team "no", consisting of Annabelle Brownsword, Miyu Wadamori and Danielle Saxon came a very respectable 8th place out of 32 teams and managed to answer all but the hardest problems.

Burnside's "Team328" who had previously had great success in the Australasian competitions were represented only by Misha Pavlov on this occasion as his team mates were unavailable. He acquitted himself brilliantly and was close to gaining an extra fifty points to boost his final placing but ran out of time. His final placing of 10th out of 32 teams was still an impressive final result.

Well done to all those students. We now look forward to the upcoming New Zealand Programming Contest which is to be held at UC on the 10th September. If you are keen on coding and want to get involved, contact Steve Rodkiss in the Digital Technologies Department.