May 10, Alabama High School, Middle School Students Compete In Programming Contests

The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Department of Computer and Information Sciences (CIS) will host a statewide high school programming contest Saturday, May 10. The contest, 10:30 a.m.-4:45 p.m. in Campbell Hall, 1300 University Blvd., features Alabama high school students in public, private and home schools. Students from Huntsville, Birmingham, Mobile, Auburn, Tuscaloosa, Montgomery and other cities will be participating.

May 2, 2008

• $7,000 in prizes; grades 3-12

• Alice Film Festival held same day

• Few Alabama high schools teach computer science

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Department of Computer and Information Sciences (CIS) will host a statewide high school programming contest Saturday, May 10. The contest, 10:30 a.m.-4:45 p.m. in Campbell Hall, 1300 University Blvd., features Alabama high school students in public, private and home schools. Students from Huntsville, Birmingham, Mobile, Auburn, Tuscaloosa, Montgomery and other cities will be participating.

During the three-hour contest, students are asked to solve six problems by providing a solution written in the C++ or Java programming languages. UAB CIS sponsors the competition as an outreach program to improve awareness of computing within the state. Fewer than 10 high schools in Alabama offer computer science courses.

The contest is in its fourth year, but 2008 is the second year for the Alice Film Festival, held on the same day, in which students submit movies written in Alice, an interactive graphical programming environment that has been successful in introducing computing to younger children. Elementary through high school students have been working over the past year on movies written in Alice, which will be shown during the competition and judged based on creativity and technical proficiency.

The keynote speaker for participants of both events is Barb Ericson, director of CS Outreach at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Ericson is internationally known for her work with secondary schoolteachers to improve CS education and to increase the quantity and quality of CS students. She is an author of a recent book on programming using multimedia computation.

In addition to individual awards, schools with more than three participants also are eligible to participate in the team competition. The first-place winner of the programming contest receives a Dell laptop; second place, a Nintendo Wii; and third place, a $50 bookstore gift certificate.  First- through third-place finishers also receive a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio. All top 15 contestants will receive a textbook from Pearson Education.

The contest is sponsored by the UAB CIS Department, Cardinal Health MedMined, Dell, Pearson-Addison-Wesley, CTS and Microsoft.

More details about these separate events are available at: www.cis.uab.edu/programs/hspc and www.cis.uab.edu/programs/alice-festival  or contact CIS faculty member and contest director Jeff Gray, Ph.D., at 205-934-8643 or gray@cis.uab.edu for more information.

The computer programming contest is one of several K-12 outreach events UAB CIS offers, Gray said. Summer computer science camps are available. Other activities include:

  • Giving guest talks to science classes and clubs
  • Hosting field trips to provide broad exposure to many computer topics
  • Yearlong mentoring for science fair project preparation
  • Hosting summer camps for high school and middle school students
  • Enrollment for CS 201 in the summer