Junior Henry Liu, a member of the computer programming team, placed fourth nationally out of 5,000 participants in the IBM Master the Mainframe competition.
“It’s a high school and college level competition that requires mainframe programming on corporate level computers,” computer science teacher Dan Forhan said.
In honor of his fourth place achievement, Liu was invited to participate in a two day all-expenses paid tour of the IBM Headquarters in New York this spring.
Although he was successful in the competition, Liu doesn’t see this kind of computer programming in his future.
“The contest uses COBOL, a very old programming language,” Liu said. “It’s getting outdated, so I don’t see it being used in the future.”
Liu wasn’t the only T-Hawk to participate in the contest. According to Forhan, there were 78 students, most of whom are on the computer programming team, who participated.]
“Students can explore stuff they can’t do in class,” Forhan said.
Each week members complete a series of problems writing code such as C++ and Java. This software is used to write codes for games and websites.