NZ Triumph in Thailand

News Release

NZ Triumph in Thailand

Two New Zealand students have won medals at a prestigious international computer programming competition held in Pattaya, Thailand. The two were part of a four member NZ team to attend the world’s premier High School programming competition. The team selected to represent NZ consisted of Logan Glasson (Burnside High School, Christchurch), Jamie McCloskey (Canterbury University), Tom Levy (Hillcrest High, Hamilton) and Tony Sun (Christ’s College, Christchurch). Glasson and McCloskey both received bronze medals at the closing ceremony on July 28.

The annual International Olympiad of Informatics (IOI) features over 300 of the world’s top computer science high school students who are selected through national computing contests. 250,000 young people from over 80 countries compete each year to represent their country at the IOI. Glasson won bronze in 2010 whilst McCloskey has previously won bronze medals in 2009 and 2010.

The NZ team was accompanied by Team Leader, Margot Phillipps, director of the NZ Olympiad in Informatics and Deputy Team Leader, Robert Bowmaker. This year’s competition was particularly tough. Bowmaker commented “I’m very pleased that New Zealand has performed so well despite our small population. This is particularly impressive given a national curriculum that is unusual in the world for failing to incorporate any strong informatics content. The students have ranked amongst the best and brightest students in the world, and their results are testament to their hard work”.

The competition is split over two days. Each competition session lasted 5 hours in which competitors demonstrated their skills in problem solving, design of algorithms and data structures, programming and testing. The students described the contest as challenging, intense but fun.

This is the sixth IOI Phillipps has attended as team leader. She is very proud of all the team members. “This year’s team members have all worked and practised assiduously. The results are extremely respectable in the context of the world’s toughest high school informatics competition. New Zealand students are relatively young and our organisation to train and support the team has a minimal budget compared to many competing countries. I am very pleased that we have continued to win medals in this prestigious contest”.

The team would like to acknowledge the support received from the Royal Society of NZ, University of Canterbury, University of Auckland, Solnet, Internet NZ and several anonymous donations.

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