SBCC’s two programming teams, SBCC Alpha and SBCC One, competed in the 2011 Southern California Regionals for the International Collegiate Programming Competition held Saturday 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, San Diego State University, CSU Los Angeles, CSU Fullerton, the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, CSU Dominguez Hills, Azusa Pacific University and others. This is the second year in a row that SBCC has been ranked the top two-year college.

SBCC One, consisting of Jason Howell, Jamie Kroll and Aaron Lamar, also competed 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, University of California-San Diego, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, UCLA, SBCC, CSU Channel Islands, UC Riverside, UC Irvine and others.

The overall winner, from USC, solved all eight problems in four hours. USC will compete in the ICPC World Finals in Warsaw, Poland, in 2012. The official results can be found on the ICPC web site.

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

— Stephen Strenn is a professor of computer science at SBCC.