High School, Middle School Students to Compete in Programming Contests

The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Department of Computer and Information Sciences (CIS) will host a statewide high school programming contest May 12. Posted on March 26, 2007 at 3:45 p.m.

POINTS OF INTEREST

  • Statewide high school programming contest, 10:30 a.m.-4:45 p.m. May 12

  • Outreach activity of the UAB Department of Computer and Information Sciences faculty, who also mentor high school students in a number of ways

  • New this year to the contest is an Alice Film Festival. Alice is an interactive graphical programming environment used to introduce computing to younger children.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Department of Computer and Information Sciences (CIS) will host a statewide high school programming contest May 12. The contest, 10:30 a.m.-4:45 p.m. in Campbell Hall, 1300 University Blvd., is open to all Alabama high school students in public, private and home schools.

During the three-hour contest, students are asked to solve six problems by providing a solution written in the C++ or Java programming languages. UAB CIS sponsors the competition as an outreach program to improve awareness of computing within the state. Fewer than 10 of the high schools in the state offer computer science courses.

The contest is in its third year, but new in 2007 will be an Alice Film Festival, held on the same day, in which students submit movies written in Alice, an interactive graphical programming environment that has been successful in introducing computing to younger children. Elementary through high school students have been working over the past year on movies written in Alice, which will be shown during the competition and judged based on creativity and technical proficiency.

The keynote speaker for participants of both events is Caitlin Kelleher, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa. Kelleher will present an introduction to Alice and her work on motivating children, in particular middle school girls, to learn programming.

Registration for the programming portion is limited to the first 40 students to respond, and the deadline for registration is April 20. In addition to individual awards, schools with more than three participants also are eligible to participate in the team competition. Registration is $20 per student.

The first-place winner of the programming contest receives a Dell laptop; second place, a Microsoft Xbox 360; and third place, a $50 bookstore gift certificate. First- through third-place finishers also receive a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio. All top 15 contestants will receive a textbook from Addison-Wesley.

The contest is sponsored by the UAB CIS Department, MedMined, Dell, Pearson Addison-Wesley, CTS and Microsoft. More details about these separate events are available at www.cis.uab.edu/programs/hspc and www.cis.uab.edu/programs/alice-festival. Or contact CIS faculty member and contest director Jeff Gray, Ph.D., at 205-934-8643 or gray@cis.uab.edu for more information.

The computer programming contest is one of several K-12 outreach events UAB CIS offers, Gray said. Other activities include:

  • Giving guest talks to science classes and clubs

  • Hosting field trips to provide broad exposure to many computer topics. For instance, West End High School will be visiting UAB CIS for a tour March 30.

  • Yearlong mentoring for science fair project preparation

  • Hosting summer camps for high school and middle school students. For more information, go to www.cis.uab.edu/programs/camps

  • Enrollment for CS 201 in the summer

For more information on outreach, go to www.cis.uab.edu/gray/Outreach.