It’s Wednesday around 7:20 a.m, and because it’s a late start, that means most students are sleeping, but five teams of students and computer programming teacher, Harrison Palzewicz, are in the Highlander Walkway waiting. They’re feeling a tad bit nervous because the bus they are waiting for is late, but it soon arrives and the teams start to pile into the bus. They are ready to test their programming skills and compete with other schools including each other at the Marquette programming competition.
The five programming teams included The Pancakes, Bubble Guppies, The Idioms, Palindromes and The Elephants. Harrison Palzewicz, computer science teacher, said he felt “nervous because the bus was late, but also prepared because of the planning that was put into this.”
Maya Graupe, senior Bubble Guppies team member said she felt “excited and happy to participate to see what happens.”
The teams arrived at Marquette to find things were kind of cramped inside the computer lab they were to do the problems in. However, not all was ready when they arrived.
Palzewicz said “theVSCode (programming editor to complete the problems in) wasn’t installed and set up when we arrived.” However he did also say, “This year, Marquette was more organized than in previous years.”
As the teams scrambled to install and set up their editors, William Harwood, senior, stated that the systems “felt very laggy and slow; it felt very stressful”.
However some of the editors didn’t work and code had to be done on other systems like Replit. This caused many issues especially during the competition when submissions were having issues.
When the competition started, Harwood’s team, The Pancakes, felt they were off to a great start.
Harwood states, “We flew through the first two problems and felt really confident at the beginning.”
However things seemed to slow down as Harwood shared, “We began to slow down as the problems got harder but we ended up completely five out of the nine total. We are pretty happy with that amount.”
Graupe added, “I felt like I was in the zone.”
Once the time was over and the competition was finished Graupe stated, “Once it was done, I felt pretty inspired”. Graupe said that as a team they were only able to accomplish four or five problems but said she was “happy with the work we were able to do.”
The Pancakes ended up placing second in the entire competition and Harwood stated he felt “suprised at the results but very happy we won.”
For the he Bubble Guppies team, Graupe stated, “I don’t really remember (where we placed) but it was under third place.”
Palzewicz stated, “I’m happy with how the teams placed and was able to look at the competition from another room where I could see the live scoreboard.”
The Pancakes ended up with earbuds as their reward for placing in second place while the first team got drones while the third place team ended up with digital notebooks.
As Palzewicz and the teams began to exit the school, the Bubble Guppies were able to convince Palzewicz to make a quick stop on the Marquette campus for some bubble tea to celebrate everyone’s performance and to end the day.
