Congratulations to Santa Barbara City College’s two programming teams, SBCC Alpha and SBCC One. The two teams completed in the 2011 Southern California Regionals for the International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC) Saturday November 12th held at Riverside Community College.

SBCC Alpha won honors as the Top Scoring Two Year College in the competition. The team, consisting of Roxanne Brittain, Daniel Guimaraes, and Amy Drafahl, ranked 20th overall, scoring higher than all teams from UCSB, UC Irvine, Cal Poly Pomona, SDSU, CSU LA, CSU Fullerton, UNLV, CSU DH, Azusa Pacific Univsity, and others. This is the second year in a row that SBCC has been top two year college. SBCC One, consisting of Jason Howell, Jamie Kroll, and Aaron Lamar, also completed successfully, outranking teams from UC Riverside, CSU Fullerton, and Moorpark College.

The ICPC challenges three person student teams to solve a set of eight programming problems in five hours. This year, 77 teams from 27 institutions from the Southern California area competed, including: Cal Tech, Harvey Mudd, USC, UCSD, Cal Poly SLO, UCLA, SBCC, CSU Channel Islands, UC Riverside, UC Irvine, and others. The overall winner, from the University of Southern California solved all eight problems in four hours. USC will compete in the ICPC World Finals to be held in Warsaw, Poland in 2012. The official results can be found on the ICPC website.

SBCC’s success in pitting themselves against students from world-class universities is a testament to the hard work, determination, and intellect of our students. And special thanks go out to the Computer Science faculty and TA’s (Rob Dependahl, Jackie Kuehn, Dean Nevins, Stephen Strenn, Soheyla Jvanbakht, David Gowens, et al) for their guidance and support.

The ICPC is a great opportunity for students to test their programming skills and compete with like-minded peers. This year’s contest is being held on 11/12. Please contact Stephen Strenn at strenn@sbcc.edu by 10/27. Meet in H-245 at 11:30 on 10/28.