Four teams of students from Algoma University’s School of Computer Science and Technology put their problem-solving skills to the test in a programming competition held at the school on Saturday.

The event serves as a regional qualifier for the International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC), in which schools from around the world participate each year. Venue coordinator Anthony Pagnotta says the four teams competing Saturday will be given a series of problems to solve during the one-day event.

“They’ll have complicated wording and tricks – you kind of have to read what the real problem is to understand, ‘what is the underlying algorithm I need to implement?’ Then you will be given a set of input data and a set of output data, and you will have to try to match the input data to the output data,” said Pagnotta, who is also a session instructor at the Algoma University. “We give you some sample questions, you submit your code and you have to run it on a big data set of test examples.”

Although the majority of the School of Computer Science and Technology’s curriculum is theoretical in nature, Pagnotta says the algorithmic programming competition provides students with hands-on experience while applying their theoretical knowledge.

“It gets students thinking and practicing writing real-world code that they would write at work, which they need to start thinking about, my end users are going to do weird things, so I have to take that into account as well. » he said. “It’s really good hands-on practice and complements the student’s training.”

Saturday’s competition marks the first year Algoma University has hosted a regional ICPC qualifying competition. In previous years, Sault students have traveled to Lake Superior State University, Michigan Tech and Northern Michigan University to compete in regional competitions.

“We had a pretty good turnout this year,” Pagnotta said. “I hope that this one will be successful and that we will be able to welcome more and more students each semester.”

Sault College has been invited by Algoma University to participate in an invitational programming competition during the upcoming semester.