Cy Woods high school produces studs at computer programming; a group of students won yet another award for the computer science program.

Three students placed first overall at a HackerRank computer science programming contest. The three students, Zeki Gerbuz, Sidh Suchdev and Ronak Malik used their programming genius to top over 200 teams from around the country and take home the first place prize.

Each student has their own background of getting introduced to the science in separate ways. Some started because of a recruitment from the computer science teacher himself, Stacey Armstrong.

“I got into computer science a bit before I started high school when Mr. Armstrong was advertising the club to my geometry class.” said Gerbuz.

There’s always the possibility of the love of something starting simply because just someone decided to try it. That was the case for Suchdev.

“I got into computer science in ninth grade, when I decided to take the AP Computer Science class,” Suchdev said. “I really enjoyed programming, so I decided to join the Computer Science club: a club where you participate in competitive programming competitions.”

Others start from other electronic interests.

“I was originally introduced to computer science through video games,” said Malik. “I wanted to do more than the game currently offered, so I tried writing my own modifications.”

Computer science isn’t easy by any means. It’s an elective at Cy Woods and it’s counted as an AP class for the upper science classes. To be as good as the computer science team, it goes without saying practice is needed: a lot.

The word ’practice’ and how much it needs to happen  has no set definition, so there is no telling what some might do to practice. Some could go big and do a lot at once.

“I personally do much of my programming through large-scale projects, incorporating different algorithms and techniques into a larger whole,” Said Malik.

Practicing for computer science isn’t always that special. Sometimes it’s just like studying for any other test in school.

“Training for a competition is a lot like studying for a math test except you don’t know what the test is over,” said Suchdev. “The topics on competitions range from simple text manipulation to incredibly hard math problems.”

While some might stay small and bang out rep after rep.

“To train, I usually solve problems on contest websites online such as Codeforces, AtCoder and Kattis,” said Gurbuz. “I also compete in practice contests with UTD, UT and the Florida High School Programming Series.

These students are really good at what they do and the Cy Woods computer science team is helped a lot by their skills.