Computer team places fourth at ACSL All-Star competition

Blair's senior computer team placed fourth at the American Computer Science League (ACSL) All-Star competition on May 30. They competed against over 200 schools in the U.S., Canada, Japan and Europe.

The ACSL organizes computer science and computer programming contests for junior and senior high school students. Blair's intermediate team also was invited to compete in this event, which was held in Chicago, but they did not place.

The senior team consisted of juniors Kendra Leigh, Greg Eden and Michael Li, sophomore John Silberholz, and freshmen Matt McCutchen. Teachers Dennis Heidler and Mary Ann Dvorsky helped the Blazers prepare and accompanied the Blazers to the competition.

To prepare for the competition, the computer team held a three-hour practice competition between the senior and intermediate teams and finished five study packets Dvorsky created. This included topics that the short answer questions were likely to include at the All-Star meet.

Blair's senior team scored highest of any senior five team on the short answer questions but dropped to fourth place because of a mistake on the most important programming problem. McCutchen said although the team faltered on the one problem, they placed well overall. "It wasn't so much time management or not knowing how to program as much as just not paying attention to the disaster that was coming up and not seeing what was going on," McCutchen said. "I wouldn't analyze it too much. We did really well on the short answers and as a whole."

For more information, click here.