Top Minds Compete
Posted: March 29, 2012
What do you call a club that has attained an incredible record of four firsts and one second over the last five years? The SAC Programmer’s Association, or SAC PrAs for short.
The club, started by Calvin Seo ’08, has exploded under the presidency of Amin Nikbin ’12 and become nothing short of exceptional. Last year SAC finished 13th at the regional annual Educational Computing Organization of Ontario (ECOO) competition. There were 51 teams representing the best and brightest from both public and independent schools across Ontario.
The story continued yesterday here at SAC as our school hosted the ECOO Programming Contest. Teams of no more than four students were given four problems to solve, using just one computer and working as a team. Six independent schools vied for the honour of representing the Independent School Board at the regional contest, which will be held at York University and include schools from other boards squaring-off against each other to determine the best team in the province.
SAC PrAs has 24 members, and 16 of them were selected to form the four teams used to represent St. Andrew’s yesterday. The contest lasted three hours but SAC 1 was the first to post some points—a whopping 139 points—to take an early lead. This set the stage for a decisive first place finish. SAC 1 never lost the lead and finished with a score of 394 points, which was 82 points ahead of the second place team. SAC 2 finished a respectable fourth with a score of 235 points.
Both SAC 1 and SAC 2 earned the right to go to the regional contest. SAC 4 and SAC 3 finished 10th and 14th respectively out of the 18 teams competing.
Team Members
SAC 1: Amin Nikbin ’12, Nicholas Chin ’12, Alan Daniels ’12, Joel Lat ’13
SAC 2: Shawn Kim ’12, David Hsieh ’12, Minjoo Cha ’12, Lyndon Zhao ’13
SAC 3 Ben Stanborough ’12, Haitian Yu ’12, Andy Lee ’13, Dong-Geun Cho ’13
SAC 4: Kyle Barber ’12, Christian Tam ’12, William Liang ’13, Michael Chiang ’13.
Congratulations to all the team members and a special thank you to Amin Nikbin for his great leadership and dedication to SAC PrAs and its members.
Story by Terry Prezens, Computer Science
