Students from 18 high schools throughout Southeast Wisconsin and Northeast Illinois gathered at the Milwaukee School of Engineering on Friday, November 19, for their annual Opportunity Conference Computer Programming Competition. Whitewater was represented by seniors Elijah Grall, Cooper Hammond, Arno Crowley, Guin Yeager, and Collin Hoxie, juniors Brooke Bazeley and Drew Swartz, and freshman Andrew O’Toole.
The students worked in teams of four, using two laptops per team, to solve as many of the nine competition problems as possible in Java or Python. Teams electronically submitted their solutions to the judges as they finished them and were either rewarded with positive points or with a deduction of 3 points and a message to try again. After 2.5 hours of steady hard work, the competition was closed, and students headed off to the auditorium to learn about Rosie, MSOE’s supercomputer, and how it uses deep neural networks to solve problems. When the winners of the competition were announced, a team from Whitefish Bay High School came out on top.
The students are looking forward to the next in-person contest, which will be at Marquette University in the spring.
Article and Photos Submitted by Laura Masbruch
Whitewater High School Computer Science Teacher
lmasbruch@wwusd.org
