Public Affairs

AUK Teams Qualify to ACPC

17th Oct 2019 | by the Department of PR & Marketing

Two teams of computer science and computer engineering students from the American University of Kuwait (AUK) ranked 8th and 10th place winners at the 7th Kuwait Collegiate Programming Contest (KCPC)—a problem-solving and programming contest for local college students. They will be representing AUK and Kuwait regionally in the Africa and Arab Collegiate Programming Championship (ACPC) in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt in November, 2019. Winning teams will then fly to Moscow in 2020 to represent their countries in the world finals at the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC).
 
This year, four student teams represented AUK and competed against 38 other teams from nine local public and private universities. AUK’s teams, //noComment and TheEidBringers, were among the local teams that qualified to the regional round in Egypt from the local round of the competition held at Kuwait College of Science and Technology (KCST). The teams were coached by engineering lab instructors, Mr. Ahmed Hassanein and Mr. Haseeb Jabbar. AUK’s winning teams included the following students: Noureldin Khalil, Islam Rezk, Ghareeb Thiab, Abdulaziz Karam, Anas El-Ghabra, and Anwar As’ad.

During the competition, each team—comprising of three students using one computer—were given a set of programming questions to answer within a five-hour period. Winners were determined by the number of correct answers submitted in one of two programming languages, C++ or Java, during the shortest period of time. 

The Dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS), Dr. Amir Zeid, praised the AUK teams for their efforts in this year’s challenge. He noted that AUK has qualified to the regional ACPC several times before, commenting that, “The competition is a great chance for our students to experience software development and efficient algorithm design. We are looking forward to the next regional round in Egypt.”

Team mentor, Mr. Hassanein, expressed that, “In the weeks leading up to the competition the teams have been training hard and practicing by solving problems from previous competitions. They utilized the knowledge acquired from the courses taught at AUK and managed to demonstrate their excellence at the competition.”