Last weekend, several CS students from Ball State traveled to Huntington University, in Huntington, Indiana for the Consortium for Computing Sciences in College. We listened to several talks on various topics relating to CS. We also presented on our experience with Scrum and Agile, in addition to the Morgan's Raid project. Our topics were well received, and the team as a whole had a great deal of fun.
In addition to the talks and presentations, we six students also participated in the programming competition, in groups of three. No one on my team (myself included) had ever done a programming competition before, so it was a bit of a change from the usual. The other BSU team had a few members who had been before, and it showed. They ended up placing 3rd out of 16 teams, with our team placing 8th.
I wasn't upset with our showing, and I was happy that the other BSU squad did well. My team had slight issues with some basic parsing that we probably shouldn't have, which leads me to a few thoughts on the event:
Parsing, Parsing, Parsing
All of the problems required the teams to parse data that was input by the judges. There was some confusion as to what the end of document character was. If I was going to study one thing to prepare again, it would be basic I/O.
Divide and Conquer
Our team developed a strategy in the midst of the chaos. One member had a good hold on one of the problems, so we turned the keyboard and monitor to him and let him run. Myself and the third remaining member turned our collective attention to another problem. We ended up running out of time, but this approach seemed to work. I worry about putting a lot of faith in one person understanding something. If they end up faltering, that's a lot of wasted time.
Three Heads Are Worse Than Two
I'm used to doing pair-programming, so doing trio-programming was strange. We weren't sure how to divide the work. We had a single machine and a single (very small) monitor to share. We made use of extra desk space and spare paper to write out code by hand. If I had to do it over again, I'd suggest having the three of us look at all of the problems, decide which ones are easiest, and work through them in that order - splitting off and working in pairs when necessary.
I had a lot of fun, and I look forward to doing the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest in less than a month. It'll be a bit more difficult, so I'm working through some Project Euler problems to help prepare. I'll be sure to chronicle the events leading up to the contest.
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