MADISON – Teams from James Clemens High School earned top places in the Team Programming Challenge, a fall virtual event coordinated by Alabama Consortium for Technology in Education Inc. or ACTE.

In Level 4 for grades 9 and 10, James Clemens’ team named “The Bandwidth Besties” claimed first place. Team members were Madhu Balaji, Nivriti Eadala, Connie Guo and Grace Hur.

In addition, Andrew Gohlich, Hannah Park, Sophia Simpson and Brian Venson in the team “Expecting Crashes” earned third place.

Among the teams in Level 5 for grades 11 and 12, James Clemens’ “JCHS Group 6” team not only won first place but earned a perfect score in the contest. Team members were Daniel Je, Pranav Somu, Joshua Wang and Jeremiah Yang.

In proximity of their schoolmates, Team “Oriental Market” with members Koury Harmon, Steve Jung, Alex King and Jaden Yu reached second place in the competition.

Kayla Brown sponsors the teams.

ACTE officials issued a special thank-you “for a great job to Jerry Zheng, our resident ACTE competition manager . . . for co-running the state competition for the second year in a row.” Zheng, also from James Clemens, created the first virtual platform for students to practice and compete in the state-level competition. He formulated questions, wrote test cases and coordinated the competition online.

ACTE’s goal is to serve as a conduit for student success in the field of computer programming. The organization assists students in sharpening programming skills, recruiting and building collaboration skills for team programming.

ACTE activities support Gov. Kay Ivy’s Alabama Computer Science Initiative. The following passage is in the initiative: “. . . Provide all Alabama learners with access to excellent STEM educational programming and experiences that build a solid foundation and provide opportunities for entry into the workforce.”

During competition, teams log on to the competition website and click the competition that they want to join. All students join a common WebEx meeting for attendance purposes. They remain in the WebEx meeting to ask questions, report errors, clear up confusion and listen for contest managers to announce any rule changes.

When the competition begins, teams can view all problems, descriptions and other problem information. Teams ultimately submit their code, which they can complete in the permitted languages, including C99, C++11, Java and Python3.

For more information, visit alabamaconsortiumfortechnologyineducation.org.