More than 200 college and high school students compete for the national title
The fourth annual Qatar Collegiate Programming Competition (QCPC) took place at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMU-Q) with teams from CMU-Q and Doha College taking the top spots for the university and high school categories, respectively. CMU-Q is a partner university of Qatar Foundation.
The QCPC is the only national programming competition in Qatar. This year, high school students competed in their own category. More than 200 students participated, forming 35 university-level teams and 29 high school teams.
CMU-Q Dean Michael Trick spoke to the students at the awards ceremony. He said that programming competitions help build a community around creative problem-solving.
Students, this competition asks you to be focused, creative and detail-oriented under pressure. Congratulations on a job well done.
This year’s event was in collaboration with the Hamad Bin Jassim Center for K-12 Computer Science Education and the Qatar Computing Research Institute, sponsored by Nestle and Snoonu.
Most prestigious competition worldwide
The winning team included three computer science students from CMU-Q – Andrey Genze, Ulan Seitkaliyev, and Gulnaz Serikbay. The high school team, meanwhile, included Suhail Abbas and Demir Khan. The participants came from 16 high schools and five universities in Qatar.
The two-day competition challenged students to answer complex programming questions. QCPC is part of the International Collegiate Programming Competition, the oldest and most prestigious competition worldwide. The winners of the QCPC will move on to compete in the Arab and African regional competitions in Egypt.
Three representatives from the Africa and Arab Collegiate Programming Competition attended to oversee and judge the competition.
According to Giselle Reis, CMU-Q’s area head for computer science and a co-organiser of the event, it is great to see students passing this forward to younger generations, and it is amazing to see previous participants becoming coaches.
Reis and Eduardo Feo Flushing, assistant teaching professor of computer science, brought the ICPC event to Qatar in 2020. Reis said that the competition is about coding, and also about problem-solving, working as a team, resilience, and concentration.
She said that the growing interest in programming helps to increase the technical expertise and innovation potential of the community in Qatar. She said she is honoured to have been a small part of it.
In addition to computer science, CMU-Q offers undergraduate degree programmes in biological sciences, business administration and information systems.
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