Burnside High School students Isaac Siu, Joseph Grace and Nicholas Grace won the New Zealand Programming contest in the High School grade.

This contest runs every year as a pre-cursor to the world championships and provides a venue for New Zealand’s brightest programmers to test their skills against the best in the country.

Burnside’s top team, who called themselves “Steve++”, scored a massive 212 points, 52 points clear of their nearest rivals from Auckland and 100 points clear of the third place team from Macleans College. The achievement is quite outstanding for a high school team and would have placed them 2nd overall if we were to compare scores in all grades including all university and adult open grade teams.

These young men showed a real “strive to excel” attitude and their success is well deserved. Unfortunately for Burnside, Joseph being in his final year is moving on to bigger and better things but we all look forward to having Nicholas and Isaac continue the tradition of programming excellence next year.