DHS Student Takes Second in U.S./Canada 'Master the Mainframe' Competition

Photo and story submitted by District 113

Deerfield High School senior Joey Bloom took second place out of nearly 5,000 high school and college students from across the United States and Canada in IBM’s 2014 Master the Mainframe Contest.

Only two of the top five winners and a handful of the Honorable Mentions were high school students, making Bloom’s finish all the more impressive.

According to the Master the Mainframe website, “The IBM Master the Mainframe contest is an exciting opportunity for students to gain real-world experience using enterprise computing skills. Hosted at high schools, colleges and universities all over the world, this unique mainframe computing contest is designed to equip students with mainframe knowledge, and challenge their skills in a hands-on coding experience.”

The contest is broken into three parts. The first part is designed to help participants learn to navigate the mainframe user interface and introduce them to basic concepts. In part two, which takes 15-20 hours, participants perform extensive programming and application developing and work with multiple operating systems. Part three is the real-world challenge, which can take anywhere from several weeks to several months.

“(In part three) they give you a task, and you’re supposed to write a program to complete the task. This year’s task was to analyze credit card data from a fictional store,” Bloom said.

Bloom’s math teacher, Steven Svetlik, said the real-world problem-solving demanded by Master the Mainframe is exactly what Computer Science is all about.

“It’s not about learning to program in a given language, it’s about learning to think computationally. You start to understand that there’s a certain flow of logic to be able to perform certain operations in a mainframe,” he said.

Svetlik said he was thrilled and proud when Bloom shared with him that he had taken second place in Master the Mainframe.

“This is a very unique and outstanding accomplishment in computing, especially for a high school student,” he said.

2014 marked Bloom’s third year participating in the contest, having learned about it from Svetlik when Bloom was a sophomore taking AP Computer Science. Bloom’s interest in computing dates back to his elementary and middle school days, when he took an HTML class as a fourth grader at Wilmot School and a computer apps class as a seventh grader at Caruso.

“The teacher showed us this program called Scratch. It’s a programming environment where instead of typing lines of code, you put blocks in a sequence and the characters on the screen follow the program you built. I used the program to make a game my friends like to play,” Bloom said.

What does Bloom love about Computer Science?

“(Computer Science) gives people the ability to discover things, make calculations and perform tasks in seconds that would take hundreds or thousands of years to do by hand. It’s very cool how CS multiplies the abilities of the person at the computer,” Bloom said.

As one of the top five finishers in Master the Mainframe, Bloom won a three-day, all-expenses paid trip to the IBM Lab in Poughkeepsie, NY in March, which he said he is very much looking forward to. He also won a 32GB Google Nexus 10 Tablet.