Ellen M. Banner

Ladue took the championship in a programming contest at Webster University, on April 5.

The team members, senior Tom Flucke and juniors Brian Jiang and Warren Biest participated in the four hour competition in which the score was based on number of completed problems per team, and in case of a tie, completion time acted as the tiebreaker, with mistakes resulting in a 20 minute penalty.

In preparation for the event, Flucke said he solved the problems used in previous years that Dr. John Pais kept, while Jiang said he did some of those problems, but what really helped was taking the AP Computer Science class.

The team used a time efficient strategy that helped them to be faster than other teams, leading to the win at the competition. According to Flucke, Webster provided each team with a packet of 10 problems that had a description of the goal.

“Two members would go through the packet, find the problem that seemed the easiest to him, and solve it while a third member would type up an already solved answer,” Flucke said.  “Toward the end, we would begin collaborating on specific problems which we couldn’t figure out.”

Not only did this team win the competition, they blew the other teams out of the water. “While it seems that most of the teams got about three or four finished, Warren, Brian and I completed eight,” Flucke said.