Carnegie Mellon, Doha College Teams Win Qatar Collegiate Programming Competition

More than 200 college and high school students compete for national title
 
Doha, Qatar – October 01, 2023 – The fourth annual Qatar Collegiate Programming Competition (QCPC) took place at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMU-Q) with teams from CMU-Q and Doha College taking the top spots for the university and high school categories, respectively. CMU-Q is a Qatar Foundation partner university.
 
The QCPC is the only national programming competition in Qatar. This year, high school students competed in their own category. More than 200 students participated, forming 35 university-level teams and 29 high school teams.
 
Michael Trick, dean of CMU-Q, spoke to the students at the awards ceremony: “Programming competitions help build a community around creative problem solving. Students, this competition asks you to be focused, creative, and detail-oriented under pressure. Congratulations on a job well done.”
 
This year’s event was planned in collaboration with the Hamad Bin Jassim Center for K-12 Computer Science Education and the Qatar Computing Research Institute. Nestle and Snoonu were sponsors. 
 
The winning team included three computer science students from CMU-Q: Andrey Genze, Ulan Seitkaliyev, and Gulnaz Serikbay. The high school team included Suhail Abbas and Demir Khan. Participants came from 16 high schools and five universities in Qatar. 
 
The two-day competition challenges students to answer complex programming questions using their programming skills. QCPC is part of the International Collegiate Programming Competition, the oldest and most prestigious competition worldwide. The winners of the QCPC will move on to compete in the Arab and African regional competition in Egypt.
 
Three representatives from the Africa and Arab Collegiate Programming Competition attended to oversee and judge the competition: Mohamed Mahmoud Abdelwahab, Mohamed Ayman Awad Elsayed, and Fatma Ahmed Helmy Mohamed.
 
Giselle Reis is CMU-Q’s area head for computer science and a co-organizer of the event. “It is great to see students passing this forward to younger generations, and it is amazing to see previous participants becoming coaches.” Reis and Eduardo Feo Flushing, assistant teaching professor of computer science, brought the ICPC event to Qatar in 2020. 
 
“The competition is about coding, but also problem solving, working as a team, resilience, and concentration,” said Reis. “The growing interest in programming helps to increase the technical expertise and innovation potential of the community in Qatar. I am honored to have been a small part of it.”
 
In addition to computer science, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar offers undergraduate degree programs in biological sciences, business administration and information systems.