Santa Barbara City College’s top-scoring programming team, SBCC Yellow, took first place honors among two-year schools in the 2020 Southern California Regionals for the International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC) on Feb. 27.

The SBCC Yellow team, consisting of Jaden Baptista, Daniel Schaffield, and Qimin Tao, outscored multiple teams from a number of four-year universities, including Cal Tech, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC Riverside and UC San Diego.

Other SBCC teams also competed successfully, outranking those from universities and colleges throughout Southern California. Those SBCC team members included Monica Aguilar, Jordan Ayvazian, Christian Foley, Berkelly Gonzalez, Jack Jebef, Jacob Lee, Patrick Maher, Gina McCaffrey, Dylan Moon, Riley Peterlinz, Vanessa Ponce, Dillon Rooke, Wyatt Spivak, Ethan Stucky and Leyla Zokhidova.

The ICPC challenges three-person student teams to solve a set of 11 programming problems in five hours. This year, 70 teams from 15 institutions competed in a fully online contest. The competition’s first place team, from UCSD, solved all 11 problems in five hours.

Several of the top teams will go on to compete in the North American Divisional Championships in April. Official results can be found on the ICPC web site.

“I am very proud of these outstanding young computer scientists,” said Stephen Strenn, computer science professor and coach. “It was an honor and a privilege to see their hard work and team spirit come to fruition.”

Strenn said thanks go out to the SBCC computer science faculty Nathalie Guebels, Jackie Kuehn, Hassine Letaief, Salmaun Masooman, Kira Minkova, Babak Shahpar, Sharon Solis, Stephen Strenn, Pat Walp; and teaching assistants Joseph Appleton and James Howard.