Oakton Students Apply Computer Science Knowledge in Programming Contest

With the encouragement of their computer science teacher, three Oakton High students enrolled in the Automated Software Testing Contest to find themselves in second place in their first-ever attempt at the competition.

Edmund Lau, a computer science teacher at Oakton High, approached three of his most promising students who also serve as programmers on the school’s robotics team to compete in the event sponsored by Innovative Defense Technologies.

Kostyanty Proskuryakov and Adam Ruffa, both sophomores, and Grant Golden, a junior, each took home an iPod nano and a total of $750 for their school in addition to the second place award, which they received at the Jan. 7 presentation and awards event at Washington-Lee High.

The contest, which ran from Nov. 11 to Dec. 27, challenged teams to program a solution to a message-based testing problem with set criteria. Each team had to create a system to facilitate the transfer of messages across a network.
IDT selected only four finalist teams from the larger pool of contest entrants to present their solutions at the Jan. 7 event.

"It was the first time I had presented a program to an audience, so I learned how to do that," Golden said.

The Oakton team’s solution implemented full networking along with a client-server side system. The team developed the program by piecing together more specific smaller sections that each member had written.

"Our solution was elegant and somewhat complex, adding many features to the expected nine requirements and four bonus requirements," Ruffa said.

The trio made one mistake they are sure to never make again: They misspelled the word "receiver" throughout their program, and the judges noticed.

But spelling woes were not their only challenges along the way.

"I personally faced a challenge because the task required me to learn things that I never knew existed," Proskuryakov said.

Ruffa, on the other hand, spent one portion of the contest writing a segment to handle data parsing. He rewrote the code four times from scratch, each time deleting all of his previous code and regretting this action shortly afterward.

The three also found it difficult to plan meeting dates to collaborate on the program because of their conflicting individual schedules. But Lau came to their rescue.

"We stayed after school in Mr. Lau's room often to share ideas and pound out some code," Ruffa said.

The team took away in-depth programming experience on top of their second-place achievement.

"I am applying some things I learned through this experience to some personal projects of my own and towards possibly joining speed coding competitions," Ruffa said.

Golden, Proskuraykov and Ruffa plan to perhaps participate in other group contests and to enter the spring 2012 IDT contest, where they hope to finish with another success.

"The best part of programming is the feeling of accomplishment when you complete a large project and see it in action," Proskuryakov said.