At the end of December, the District held its first ever Advent Of Code competition. The results are in, and things went very well for Mayo High School.

The Advent Of Code is a global competition based on a series of 50 programming challenges released by Eric Wastel annually each December. Challenges involve processing sets of data given when the challenge is released. The result of the processed data is the key to solving the challenge.

 Stars can be earned for each challenge completed, two of which are released each day. Ties are broken by score, which is determined by the amount of challenges completed and how much time it took to solve the challenge. 

The local programming competition was organized by Mr. Barctuz, a CTECH teacher. Prizes were awarded to the top school and the top three individuals. Then, anybody who had completed at least one challenge was entered into a lottery to win awards from a pool of about 50 prizes. 

Mayo won the first place trophy by a landslide, with 31 stars. Century took second place; JM came in third, and Kellog wound up in fourth. The top three individuals were Micheal Huang from (Century), Finley Bartholmai (Century), and Gautam Sudarshan (Kellogg) won $150, $100, and $55 respectively. 

The event experienced some controversy; the organizers discovered several incidents of cheating involving two of the schools. Those contestants were removed from the overall rankings, which did negatively influence the results. Hopefully, this kind of practice has been eradicated, and future competitions will occur without any breach of integrity.

If you are interested in learning programming skills and want to get involved in future Advent Of Code competitions, join the Rochester Computer Club’s discord server. Additionally you can talk to either Mr. Dirks or Mr. Bartucz for more information.