Monmouth University 2nd Annual High School Programming Competition

During the 2014/2015 school year the Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE) Department decided to hold a High School Programming Competition for local schools. Calls went out, responses came in, donors came forward, and we were set – the only thing we didn’t anticipate was the snow that prevented us from holding it as scheduled the end of March! Not about to be undone by the weather, we rescheduled our event for May and had a wonderful experience with engaged and engaging faculty and students from area schools.

The most memorable outcome of last year’s competition, though, was that students and teachers all said “we hope you going to do it again!”, and so we did. And we made it bigger.

Held this year on Friday March 4, we laughed at the snow and had yet another successful event.

We were excited to host 60 talented students and their amazing CS faculty from the following schools:

• Brick Township High School,

• East Brunswick High school,

• Freehold High School,

• Henry Hudson High School,

• Middletown South High School,

• Ocean Township High School,

• Red Bank Regional High School,

• Toms River High School East,

• Toms River High School North,

• Toms River High School South.

Students started the day with a delicious breakfast and overview of Monmouth from Enrollment Management’s Patrick Dorsey, photographed and posted to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with our Social Media scavenger hunt, braved the snow for a dry run in the computing labs, and enjoyed a great lunch along with a talk about the CyberSecurity field from adjunct professor Jesse Mayer. While the students returned to the lab to work on their challenging sets of problems in the afternoon, CSSE faculty member Bill Tepfenhart shared with the high school faculty the excitement of his ongoing research with a small fleet of robotic devices.

High school and University faculty then settled down for a rewarding discussion on how we can work together. Some topics included ways to provide guidance on desirable skills for students coming into college computing programs, anticipated educational offerings for prospective CS teachers, and how we can bring our groups together more often to share ideas and resources. We were all pleased with the outcome of our dialogue and hope to have another meeting late spring/early summer.

Interested in more? See Photos from the event: http://www.csseblog.monmouth.edu/#!2016-contest-photo-gallery/xh5s3

and Competition Results: http://www.csseblog.monmouth.edu/#!the-2016-results/cuzcm

The competition was generously supported by

• Monmouth University Enrollment Management for the delicious breakfast feast

• The Monmouth University Store for student folders and MU lanyards, and the window decals in the social media spirit bags

• Monmouth University Athletics for the football ticket vouchers for all student participants

• Cengage Learning Higher Education for the 1st place team gift cards

• Linode for the social media spirit bags and phone chargers