Students in Concordia University Chicago\u2019s computer science program took yet another first place ranking in 2021 IEEEXtreme Chicago competition on Oct. 24 \u2013 the team’s sixth\u00a0 top finish among area universities in the past seven years.<\/p>\n
The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), one of the largest professional organizations in the world, hosts many coding competitions throughout the year. Their largest event is IEEEXtreme, which is a 24-hour computer coding challenge where competitors create programs according to a series of prompts or directives.<\/p>\n
Among Chicago universities, CUC students have remained dominant recently, earning a top 10 U.S. ranking for the past three years and currently sitting in the top 300 out of more than 5,500 teams worldwide.<\/p>\n
Students in CUC’s computer science major are required to compete annually, participating in teams made up of as many as three programmers. Each year, one group out of the eight teams that enter the competition from CUC is designated as the top team. This year’s top team, dubbed the “CUCBatKnights,” included Ashley Kennedy, Haotai Qi, and Jesse Broxton.<\/p>\n
\u201cSuccess motivates people, so it\u2019s very easy to motivate students in computer science to take part in IEEE,\u201d said Victor Govindaswamy, Ph.D., director of computer science programs and coach of the CUC coding teams.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor me it\u2019s fun, because you get to sit for 24 hours with like-minded people,\u201d said senior Joseph Sivits, who competed this year with the “CUCBatImmortals.” Sivits said he brought a very \u201crelaxed approach\u201d to his fourth year in the IEEE competition. “The CS program is very much a family,” said Sivits.<\/p>\n
Senior Ashley Kennedy is CUC\u2019s first woman to compete on the top team. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of a lot of pressure because you want to prove yourself, and so it was a little more stress added to the competition,\u201d Kennedy said. \u201cI think it\u2019s just hard to pull girls into this section of the STEM field, but the friends I\u2019ve made here truly feel like a family.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the 2021 event, the CUCBatKnights had to work through 26 separate coding problems that were distributed to them over the the 24-hour period. These problems would feature aspects of different computer programming languages and concepts through games.<\/p>\n
In a problem called Squad Game,<\/em> for example, CUC coders were tasked to code an “arena” in which players fight to control areas. Problems like the Squad Game<\/em> were scored based on correct programming, along with difficulty level of the problem.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think that I\u2019ve forced myself to stay up a full 24 hours before,\u201d said senior Christian Solis. \u201cIt\u2019s like math, where if you don\u2019t know something, it can be stressful, but you\u2019re also learning throughout the whole thing that makes it fun.\u201d Solis has participated all four years he\u2019s been at CUC and plans to participate in other upcoming coding competitions.<\/p>\n This article has been updated and corrected.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Students in Concordia University Chicago\u2019s computer science program took yet another first place ranking in 2021 IEEEXtreme Chicago competition on Oct. 24 \u2013 the team’s sixth\u00a0 top finish among area universities in the past seven years. The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), one of the largest professional organizations in the world, hosts many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":54,"featured_media":5236,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-concordia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/54"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5056\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}