Instead of going out and getting ready for Halloween, students at CMU are preparing for the ACM Programming Competition. Oct. 28-29 participants will compete against schools from Wyoming, Nevada and Idaho. Students will even come from Canada to submit their projects. CMU is sending three teams. Team one is made up of Emily Harbert, Gordon Gibson and Eric Wilcox. Carson Snart, Orion Stanger, and Morgan Creekmore are on team two and Marshall Sweat, Scott Hart, and Bryan Lopez are on team three. These students will compete at Colorado State University in Fort Collins this weekend.
At the programming competition teams from around the mid-west come to compete against each other by solving a set of programming problems. These problems range in difficulty levels. They give the
participants real world problem solving skills.
Professor Karl Castleton, their coach, has been helping them practice for the big event. In the past few weeks he has given CMU students pointers to succeed in Fort Collins. Castleton and another professor, Dr. Warren MacEvoy, participated in this event together in the 80s. MacEvoy helps grade problems that students submit during the competition.
In the ‘80s, CMU’s team set high standards for the school. Karl Castleton, Warren MacEvoy, Joe Livingston, and Dan Carrol qualified to compete in internationals in 1989 for the first time.
“I think it was pretty amazing when we walked in because when we walked into the room we weren’t sure we were going to win. We didn’t know, we thought we were pretty good, and put in a lot of time, but that was about it,” Castleton said.
Even though the team then did make it to Internationals, they still had to put in a lot of time practicing for the first competition itself, to see if they would be good at even that, so that took some time as well.
“Essentially we have been practicing since we were freshmen, it is just something we like to do. We always messed with solving those kind of problems, competed a lot in the local contest, as well as regional contest,” said MacEvoy.
The team treated Internationals like the other competitions and it remained something they enjoyed
doing. They practiced the same way they did for regionals. The team did not place well at Internationals but were happy they had the opportunity.
For this year’s competition Castelton is passing on the tradition by giving them some of his wisdom.
“There is one key strategy,” Castleton said. “It is to find the simplisit problem and solve it very quickly.”

hvice@mavs.coloradomesa.edu