by Bailey Musselman '18

It is common as a college student to wonder when skills gained in the classroom will be used in the real world. For computer science and mathematics major Jay Wang '17, participating in a computer programming competition brought value to the skills he's gained throughout his time at Knox.

Wang and other computer science students had the opportunity to test their skills at the regional programming contest and poster competition at the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges (CCSC) at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana. Students competed with participants from 23 different Midwest region colleges and universities such as Bradley University, Calvin College, and Quincy University.

Knox placed second in the programming competition.

Competitors were asked to solve seven challenging problems and were scored based on the number of problems solved and the amount of time it took to solve them. As one of the Knox College teams, Myra Doubet ‘19 and Wang completed two out of the seven problems in 216 minutes.

"Programming contests are tests about algorithms and problem-solving, and both are important for programmers," Wang said, "Having an award in a programming contest shows that you are more likely to be a better programmer."

Wang attended the competition after his participation in Computer Science 180: Programming Language and Tools workshop. He described the experience as a "nail-biter" because Knox held the lead for a portion of the competition.

"It's a skill, but it isn't often that we get to show it off, which is why the competition is fun," said Wang.

The team that placed first was able to complete three out of seven problems. 

The poster competition gave students the chance to exhibit the research they had been pursuing. Doubet shared second place for her poster "A New Global Link Arrangement for Supercomputers: Dragonfly Nautilus," a joint work with Madison Belka '17.

Other Knox presentations included Wang's research on "Improving Valiant Routing in Slimfly Topology," a joint work with Deyu Han ‘16.

Associate Professor and Chair of Computer Science David Bunde, and his student, Michael Gerten ‘16, also presented their paper "Results of student census in Computer Science 2," sharing experiences of why students pursued studies in computer science.

Bunde has attended many computer science-related competitions since joining the Knox community nearly 11 years ago.

In addition to the CCSC event, Bunde and computer science students attended a programming contest conducted by Association for Computing Machinery, in which colleges and universities from the Mid-Central region of the United States compete. The competition was held at University of Illinois-Springfield, where 25 teams made up of both undergraduate and graduate students competed. 

"I am always proud of our students," said Bunde. "It's important to go out into the world. It's important for students to see what's going on in the computer science world outside of our department at Knox."