ready set CODE

Harker’s Programming Club will host its annual Harker Programming Invitational [HPI], which will include competitions, a college fair, and keynote speeches, this Sunday in Nichols Hall from 7:30 a.m. to 2:10 p.m.

The Invitational

The two-hour main round will begin at 8:45 a.m. Each team of up to three people will use a single laptop computer to solve programming problems on the Programming Club’s website. Competitors can submit code using Python, Java or C++. A half-hour challenge round will begin at 11:20 a.m.

HPI will feature both Novice and Advanced divisions, which allow programming students of different levels to participate and compete with others on the same level as them.

“The reason why we have these two division is to allow competitors and people interested in computer programming who have a year or less of computer experience to not be intimidated by those who have been programming for a while,” David Zhu (10) said. “They have their own separate division and they can be comfortable knowing that the problems will not be incredibly difficult for them.”

In addition to the competition, HPI will feature a keynote address by Anna Patterson from Google.

“She’s very involved in the creative side of Google,” Programming Club President Sadhika Malladi (11) said. “We thought that it would be cool to have someone who does both computer science and design.”

The road to HPI

Behind the scenes, Harker’s Programming Club works to prepare for HPI. The process involves activities ranging from obtaining funding to writing the competition questions.

“The biggest thing we have to work on is getting sponsors to fund the event, and so we contact a lot of companies that would be interested in helping high school computer science education,” Sadhika said. The sponsors of HPI this year include Make School, Pebble, and ACEprep.

Sophomores David Zhu and Manan Shah help write problems for the invitational.

“The problem set writing process involves an initial discussion about the level of difficulty of the set, after which the writers work individually on their respective problems,” Manan said. “After thorough vetting is completed, the problems are ready to be released.”

Registration was available until March 1, but by Feb. 28, the Programming Club sent out an email notification that the maximum number of teams had registered and new teams could register only for the waitlist.

After registration closed, more than 20 teams had been waitlisted, including the team of Jimmy Lin (9).

“When we were trying to wait for the deadline, seeing who would participate on our team, we ended up waiting too long,” Jimmy said. “That’s how we ended up being on the waitlist.”

College Fair, ProCo and beyond

After registered teams have finished competing, they will have an opportunity to meet college professors at the college fair during lunch.

“Our college fair is really geared towards helping students learn what their opportunities are,” Sadhika said. “We have a bunch of local colleges as well like CMU coming.”

After the Invitational has finished, eager programmers will have more opportunities to compete and learn.

“Of course there’s the USACO competitions–so that’s the USA Computer Olympiad, and those are by far the most popular problems to train with,” David said.

Programmers can also attend hackathons, where they work with a team to build an application in a few days.

“Other [students] who are more interested in the development process should register in Hackathons for hands-on building experience,” Manan said.

Another programming contest after the Invitational is Stanford University’s ProCo.

“ProCo […] is the Stanford programming competition, and this is what our Harker programming invitational is modeled after, so that’s also a really good competition to attend,” David said.

According to its website, ProCo also has novice and advanced divisions. Registration for ProCo will be open from March 18 to April 17, and the competition will be on May 17.

This piece was originally published in the pages of The Winged Post on March 13, 2015.