The De Soto High School programming team achieved great success at their programming competition at Kansas State University Nov. 1.  The team, consisting of juniors Alex Webber, Cody Moose and Zach Deibert, received first place out of 33 teams in the advanced division.

The students answered questions in four rounds, each round consisting of 30 minutes and one question. The last round lasted 45 minutes, with two assigned problems. The problems consisted of math and logic.

“An example of a problem set would be we had to find how long two different routes would take,” Moose said. “[We were] given the length of the road and if it was comprised of highway, interstate and city roads. We had to use all of that information to find out which one would be faster and by exactly how much time.”

The programming team gets together to work and practice at Mill Valley High School during robotics program. This is where most of their preparation took place.

“We are all in robotics outside of school, so that’s kind of where do all our programming,” Webber said.

Team members worked together to ensure that every answer would be correct to earn the full amount of points possible.
“Whenever we had a problem that involved a lot of math, we would all split up and try to find the formulas needed for each individual thing. So we split the work and then double check each other’s solutions,” Moose said.

After receiving third at the same competition last year, the boys are very proud of their improvement and accomplishment.

“I think we did really well [as a team]. We got first place, and that’s always something to celebrate. I think we work well as a team with a very diverse skill set, and we are able to put it all together and do really good at competitions,” Webber said.

The programming team is excited about their victory and hopes to see programming classes introduced to De Soto in the future.

        “I just really think that we can accomplish great things, and I’m hoping that we’ll have programming classes here soon,” Webber said.