Student team triumph in Thailand

THAI TRIUMPH TEAM: Tom Levy, Logan Glasson, Jamie McCloskey and Tony Sun (left to right)

Two NZ students have won bronze medals at a prestigious international computer programming competition held in Pattaya, Thailand.

The two were part of a four member team to represent NZ in the annual International Olympiad of Informatics (IOI).

The boys were Logan Glasson from Burnside High School in Christchurch, Jamie McCloskey from Canterbury University, Tom Levy from Hamilton’s Hillcrest High, and Tony Sun from Christ’s College, Christchurch.

Both Logan and Jamie received bronze medals at the closing ceremony on July 28th, 2011.

The IOI featured over 300 of the world’s top computer science high school students who are selected through national computing contests.

Around 250,000 young people from over 80 countries compete each year to represent their country at the IOI.

Deputy team leader Robert Bowmaker was thrilled that NZ performed so well despite its small population.

“This is particularly impressive given a national curriculum that is unusual in the world for failing to incorporate any strong informatics content.  The students have ranked amongst the best and brightest students in the world, and their results are testament to their hard work,” he said.

The competition was split over two days with each competition session lasting five hours.

Competitors demonstrated their skills in problem solving, design of algorithms and data structures, programming and testing. The students described the contest as challenging, intense but fun.

Director of the NZ Olympiad in Informatics and team leader Margot Phillipps said, “The results are extremely respectable in the context of the world’s toughest high school informatics competition. New Zealand students are relatively young and our organisation to train and support the team has a minimal budget compared to many competing countries.”

The team would like to acknowledge the support received from the Royal Society of NZ, University of Canterbury, University of Auckland, Solnet, InternetNZ, and several anonymous donations.