Christ’s College team wins competition

Press, 2 August 1983, Page 25

Christ’s College team wins competition

Teamwork was the essence on Saturday morning when pupils from eight Christchurch high schools competed in a schools’ programming competition organised by the Canterbury Computer Education Society. A team of four pupils from each school worked together on a problem set by Mr Derham McAven, from Christchurch Polytechnic. Schools brought along their own Apple computers and all the teams chose BASIC as their programming language. The winner of the competition was a team from Christs’ College. Hillmorton High School’s team was a close second. The judge said that all the teams had a very good grasp of computing.

Members of the winning team won a box of floppy discs donated by ComputerSouth, Ltd, and a box of discs provided by the society. CED Distributors donated the Apple Pilot courseware development system to the winning school.

An organiser of the competition, Mr Graeme Sauer, of Mairehau High School, described the problem as a good team problem. Mr Gerrit Bahlman, of Christ’s College, likened the team-

work required to the cooperation necessary in a software design team in the business world.

The problem was an exercise in data manipulation. Contestants had to read a two-dimensional array of characters into memory and then print out the characters in specified patterns and orders.

Points were given for accomplishment, speed, structure, documentation, and choice of algorithm. The contestants ranged from fourth to seventh-form pupils. They were mostly using skills they had picked up in the school computer club or on a home computer, rather than skills taught in classes. Apart from a team from

Christchurch Girls’ High School, the contestants were male.

Mrs Elaine Mayo, a teacher at Hillmorton High School, said that boys made the teams rather than girls because they were more assertive. “There are no differences in ability between the sexes,” she said. “In fact, girls would make better team workers.”

In the afternoon, teams from Kirkwood Intermediate and Manning Intermediate competed in an exercise based on use of the LOGO language. Teams from Manning were first and second in the exercise, which involved drawing a Union Jack and a locomotive on the screen.