SBCC Takes 1st Place in ACM Programming Competition

Source: SBCC

Congratulations to Santa Barbara City College’s programming teams, which competed in the 2020 Southern California Regionals for the International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC) on Saturday, February 27th.

SBCC’s top scoring team, SBCC Yellow, took 1st Place Honors amongst two year schools in the competition. The team, consisting of Jaden Baptista, Daniel Schaffield, and Qimin Tao, outscored multiple teams from a number of four year universities, including Cal Tech (yes, that Cal Tech), UCI, UCLA, UCR, and UCSD.

Other SBCC teams also competed successfully at the event, outranking teams from universities and colleges located throughout the Southern California region. Their members included Monica Aguilar, Jordan Ayvazian, Christian Foley, Berkelly Gonzalez, Jack Jebef, Jacob Lee, Patrick Maher, Gina McCaffrey, Dylan Moon, Riley Peterlinz, Vanessa Ponce, Dillon Rooke, Wyatt Spivak, Ethan Stucky, and Leyla Zokhidova.

The ICPC challenges three-person student teams to solve a set of eleven programming problems in five hours. This year, 70 teams from 15 institutions in the Southern California region competed in a fully online contest. The competiton’s first place team, from UCSD, solved all eleven problems in five hours. Several of the top teams from this event will continue on to compete in the North American Divisional Championships in April. Official results can be found on the ICPC website.

“I am very proud of these outstanding young computer scientists,” said Computer Science professor and coach Stephen Strenn. “It was an honor and a privilege to see their hard work and team spirit come to fruition.”

SBCC student’s success in pitting themselves against students from world-class universities is a testament to the hard work, determination, and intellect of our students. Special thanks go out to the Computer Science faculty (Nathalie Guebels, Jackie Kuehn, Hassine Letaief, Salmaun Masooman, Kira Minkova, Babak Shahpar, Sharon Solis, Stephen Strenn, Pat Walp) and TA’s (Joseph Appleton and James Howard) for their guidance and support.