SANTA BARBARA — At the Southern California International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) held online on Feb. 27 this year, Santa Barbara City College won the top honor for two-year colleges.
The ICPC is an extra-curricular, competitive programming competition which provides college and university students opportunities to interact, demonstrate and improve their teamwork, programming and problem-solving process. In addition to hosting regional contests, the ICPC is a global platform that allows academia and industry to shine the spotlight on — and raise the aspirations of — the next generation of computing professionals as they pursue excellence.
SBCC’s top scoring team, SBCC Yellow, took First Place honors among 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 California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech), UC Irvine (UCI), UCLA, UC Riverside (UCR) and UC San Diego (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 competition’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 here.
“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 students’ success in pitting themselves against students from world-class universities is a testament to the hard work, determination and intellect of our students.”
Professor Strenn extends special thanks to his colleagues on the SBCC Computer Science faculty (Nathalie Guebels, Jackie Kuehn, Hassine Letaief, Salmaun Masooman, Kira Minkova, Babak Shahpar, Sharon Solis and Pat Walp) and teaching assistants (Joseph Appleton and James Howard) for their guidance and support.