For Immediate Release

Monday, March 18, 2019

Media Contact: Benjamin Paulin
Phone: 781-428-3299
Email: ben@jgpr.net

King Philip High School Students Take 1st Place at Providence College Computer Programming Contest

WRENTHAM — Superintendent Paul Zinni is pleased to share that a team of King Philip High School students came in first place at the 33rd Annual Providence College Computer Programming Contest last week.

Two separate sessions of the contest were held on Monday, March 11 and Tuesday, March 12. Four King Philip High School AP Computer Science students,  junior Matthew Stetter and seniors Tyler Dowd, Warren Steinbrecher, and Ethan Ball, competed as a team in the Tuesday, March 12 session of the competition against 11 other groups.

Each team of students was given a packet of problems to solve that touched on a variety of subjects, ranging from geometry and sequences to computer science. All solutions that the teams came up with were required to be in the format of a computer program that would compute the answer based on an input. Students had their choice of submitting solutions into two programming languages: C++ or Java.

To help prepare for the competition, students from each team were given a packet of problems from contests from prior years.

After winning first place in the contest, each student was awarded a $5,000 annual scholarship, should they choose to attend Providence College.

“They went into the competition with the understanding that the other teams could have much more experience than them,” said Matt Gorr, a King Philip Regional High School computer science and physics teacher who attended the contest with the students. “None of us had any expectations of winning. This victory totally belongs to this exceptional group of students. It took problem solving skills, reasoning, attention to detail, and creativity to solve these problems, and they have all individually demonstrated those skills for me time and time again in class. I am very proud of them.”

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