On Saturday, Travis, Will and I competed in the TCEA Programming Competition at Alamo Heights along with 15 or so other teams from various schools around SA. Last year, Travis and I were on a team, and we scored a measly 4 points. Yea, we sucked. This year we scored 39. We did 10 times better, and because of that, we got 2nd place in region.

The TCEA Competition is a set of 18 questions. There are six 2-point questions, relatively easy. There are six 5-point questions, medium difficulty, and for the six difficult questions, you get 9 points. Our strategy was simple. Travis and I would knock out a couple fives early, start to work on a 9, while Will worked on 2s on paper. We would switch off and let Will type in his 2 point problems. We stuck to this quite well. Will got 5 out of the 6 2’s. One of them was fairly hard and we just decided to skip it. Travis and I knocked out 3 of the fives in 25 minutes, truly incredible. We then moved onto some 9s and 5s. We got another 5 and one 9. At this point, we had 39 points. We were amazed. We were shocked that we had gotten’ over 15. By now, we had built up quite a wall of green correct answer sheets:

We had about 15 minutes left. We were in second behind Team #5 who had 46 points. Our only choice was a 9. We knew that it would be almost impossible to get a 9 in fifteen minutes. We didn’t, but we came close. Really close. We were working down to the last seconds. Anyways, 2nd is still great for us. We were very suprised that we had done the best of any the AH teams and especially that we had come in 2nd in all of the region.

1st place definitely goes to State, and 2nd might. So we are hoping that we can go onto the State competition and rack up some more points.

-Dustin