Leon Wu and Miles McGrath take first place

Burnside High School sent fifteen teams to the annual Canterbury Schools Programming Contest, held at the University of Canterbury on Saturday 22nd June.

The contest was attended by over ninety students from ten schools around the region and was one of the biggest in recent years, filling two labs at the University.

The competition requires participants to write code to solve a series of increasingly complex problems over three hours, and the top problems are often more complex than you would find in most university algorithms courses. Former winners of these competitions have often gone on to represent New Zealand for programming.

The top honours went to Leon Wu and Miles McGrath who managed to answer all but one question in the time limit.

They were very closely followed by another Burnside team consisting of Cameron Martin and Aditya Bansal who were only a few points behind.

Congratulations to all those who took part. There are more competitions coming up with the next round of the NZIC starting in July 1st and the New Zealand Programming Contest scheduled for August 17th.

Competitors from Burnside:

Benson Lee, Andrew Wu, Olly Kitchingman, Jason Wu, Faidhi Sazli, Mahadaven Gopalakrishnan, Pourya Izanloo, Johannes Mira-ato, Kevin Huang, David Wu, Tim Xu, Franklin Yuan, Akash Chattikal, Andrew Hales, Linus Ling, Cameron Martin, Aditya Bansal, Will Dale, Rosie Phan-Dang, Hana McMillan, Sethuni Wipulanayake, Luke Strydom , Sho Wadamori, Isaac Choi, Benajmin Wray, Matthew Thomas, Riki Smilie, Leon Wu, Miles McGrath, Miguel Monreal, Ida Clausen, Elissa Piao, Tina Ren, Pream Sirawattanakul, Ava Heath Williams, Sarah McGowan, Rachel McGowan and Daniel McGowan