NZ Triumph in Brisbane

NZ Triumph in Brisbane

Two young New Zealanders have won medals at a prestigious international computer programming competition held in Brisbane. The two were part of a four member NZ team to attend the world’s premier High School programming competition. The team selected to represent NZ consisted of Tony Sun (Auckland Grammar), Logan Glasson (Ex-Burnside High School), Alan Ansell (New Plymouth Boys’ High School) and Byung Hoon Cho (Auckland Grammar). Sun and Glasson both received bronze medals at the closing ceremony on July 12.

The annual International Olympiad of Informatics (IOI) features over 300 of the world’s top computer science high school students who are selected through national computing contests. 250,000 young people from over 80 countries compete each year to represent their country at the IOI. Both kiwi medallists have repeated the bronze medal performances they achieved in 2012.  Glasson also gained bronze in both 2010 and 2011.  In August he will travel to Ontario, Canada to take up the Mike & Ophelia Lazaridis Olympiad Scholarship at Waterloo University.  Only medallists of the IOI and the IMO (International Mathematics Olympiad) are eligible to apply for this scholarship.

The NZ team was accompanied by Team Leader, Margot Phillipps, director of the NZ Olympiad in Informatics, and Deputy Team Leader, Ronald Chan. This year’s competition was particularly tough. Phillipps commented “Our team acquitted themselves extremely well, winning 2 very high bronze awards. Although the competition did not go as smoothly as expected, the Kiwi boys represented the country with a maturity well beyond their years”.

The competition is split over two days. Each competition session lasted 5 hours in which 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. Cho commented “It was a great opportunity for everyone to talk to other countries as well as having fun competing against them”. Sun commented on the IOI experience by quoting the IOI President’s opening ceremony address saying, “everybody is a winner regardless of the outcome”. 

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

ENDS

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