Black Terminals. Green font. Computer algorithms.

In other words, heaps of mumbo-jumbo the common person is only exposed to from Karen, plankton’s wife, and other media of the sorts.

In honor of National Computer Science Education Week, UNO hosted their 9th annual programming competition on December 8th. Opponents traveled from all over the state to participate. Millard West participated, and one of four teams competing took home first place.

The competition hosted 38 teams, all required to have prior basic coding experience. Each team consisted of three students per team along with a sponsoring teacher.

IcantC was the winning team from Millard West with all senior members Ethan Schula, Austin Hamilton and Aaron Vigal.

The Quiz Bowl was from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m., and the programming bit from 1p.m. to 4 p.m. (after the intermission with a complimentary mountain of Godfathers pizza to refuel).

“It was a pretty welcoming, friendly and intelligent environment,” senior Jacob Kirshenbaum said. “There seemed like there were a lot of people there that were very knowledgeable about coding.”

In the morning, coders had a Quiz Bowl about five different categories: current events in computing, sports and entertainment, computational thinking, gaming and programming. Students were given as much time needed for the Quiz Bowl minus the final question which allowed 10 minutes to solve due to wagering points.

In the afternoon portion, the programming competition was held in which programmers had 10 different problems. It was a race to see who could solve the most.

“The hacking portion is taught through the computer programming club due to school regulations,” computer science teacher Ramsey Young said. “ That is a lot of the students teaching each other every Thursday until 5p.m.The best class for programming would be my AP Computer Science A that preps the students for these kind of competitions”

For both parts of the competition, teams were held in the same room. In the Quiz Bowl, students wrote down answers on a piece of paper so others couldn’t copy answers as easily. Soon after, the programming competition was held. Each team had all information on one computer.

“Our team smack talked other Millard West teams more than we smack talked other school teams,” Schula said. “ We aren’t barbarians. I personally didn’t get nervous until the final jeopardy, because I never really thought my team would have a chance against the 38 other teams there.”

Overall , the competition ended strong as Millard West coders went home with the prize for first place in the Quiz Bowl, a $200 security camera.