08 November 2019
On Friday 14 June, students competed in the main round of the UNSW Programming Competition which is held annually across Australia with this year attracting 181 teams.
One of our two teams scored 100 (the maximum score) and was top of the table going into the Grand Final. Congratulations to Angus Ritossa (Year 12), Eric Zhou (Year 12) and Nicholas Koh (Year 9) for this great achievement. On 7 September, they attended the UNSW Campus to compete in the Grand Final which was three hours long with five challenging questions that became increasingly difficult in nature.
One of the most impressive things about this team was their persistence in getting the best possible result. In this competition your team wins if you are the first to get to the highest score achieved. The competition finished at 12:30pm and at 12:01pm they had full marks for all questions except the last for which they had 21/29. They were winning by a long way as in the final scores the second team achieved a total of 76 and they were on 81 already. But the boys didn’t stop there. They submitted a second better solution for this tough question and at 12:21pm they were on 27/29. No one could touch them, but they didn’t stop, they kept pushing through for the best possible solution in the time and at 12:28pm they submitted a final solution which did the job and got them the full 29/29 and a perfect overall score of 100.
Their persistence and tenacity under pressure was admirable.
After the competition ended many of the students had lunch together and debriefed about how to best solve the problems. There was a large degree of camaraderie between teams which is inspiring and bodes well for collaborative industrial and community efforts in the future. I wonder what difficult problems these imaginative and creative young minds will be able to help solve.
The trophy was presented by the boys to Mr Tim Browning on Senior School Muster on Wednesday of Week 2 this term.
A reminder that Maths@Saints is held on Tuesdays and Thursdays at lunchtime in Room 8 in the Big Quad. The challenges of this competition were based around solving problems using informatics. If students like a challenge and would like to learn about informatics then they are welcome to join us.
Ms Lisa Southwell
Maths@Saints Coordinator