Donald Keough, News Editor–

The coding race was on this weekend, as the computer science department hosted their 34th annual Denison Spring Programming Contest (DSPC) in Olin Hall. 

From 1-5 p.m. on March 1, students in teams of three to four worked to complete six different problems as fast as they could. PackeeChore, a team from Denison, won this year’s competition. 

The difficulty level of the problems ranged from beginner to advanced, and were created by the director of the event professor Matt Kretchmar, who works in the computer science department. 

“They usually have a fun backstory, and the whole idea is to connect some fun, real-life thing with some problem solving,” Dr. Ashwin Lall said, referring to the problems’ content.

Lall is also a computer science professor and was the previous director of the event. Lall filled in as the director at this year’s event because Kretchmar was ill. 

According to Lall, he believes many students participate in DSPC because it’s entertaining. 

“It’s a great way to do a little bit of problem solving,” Lall said. “The fun competitive aspect of it, where you’re competing against other teams– that’s the nice little challenge that they have. There’s no monetary prizes or anything like that. It’s just purely for the fun of it. ”

Lall also said that the event could help students develop some of their computer science skills.

“There’s some degree to which being able to do this kind of problem solving particularly quickly can be helpful for CS majors when they do technical interviews,” Lall said. “Being able to do problem solving… is something that is useful. So that’s why some students do it. But most of them, I think, do it for fun.”

DSPC was started in 1991 by Todd Feil, a computer science professor who served as the DSPC’s director until his retirement in 2013. 

Over a 1,000 students have competed from 16 colleges and high schools across Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The colleges that competed this year were from Denison, Muskingum, Ohio Wesleyan, Mount Vernon Nazarene, Oberlin, Wooster and Granville High School. 

Jun Park is a first-year student at Oberlin College, and his team named “O(berlin)” placed eighth at the competition. He said that the four hours of coding went by quickly. 

“It felt like two hours, to be honest,” Park said.

He continued later, saying, “It was interesting to see everybody so locked in. It was definitely a very, very good environment to keep your mind focused on coding.”

Park and his team solved one of the problems quickly earlier on, but they struggled with other questions later on which slowed them down. 

“It’s frustrating when you keep on working on something, and then you’re like, ‘oh, what’s wrong? Nothing’s working,’” Park said. “But whenever you get something wrong, you just try [again].”

Even after the competition finished, Park’s team continued to work on some of the problems for their own enjoyment. 

“It was definitely a great experience,” Park said. “I really enjoyed it, and it was a lot of fun.”