February 24, 2014–Innovative Defense Technologies (IDT) held the final round of this year’s High School and Collegiate Programming Contest on Saturday, February 22, at Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia. The competition focused on innovative methods of implementing Automated Software Testing techniques. Several area high school and university teams participated.
In the High School Division, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (Alexandria, VA) won first place (William Moses and Abi Gopal). They were accompanied by their coach Nicole Kim. Second place went to the team from Oakton High School (Oakton, VA), which was coached by Edmund Lau (Ian Johnson and Kostyantyn Proskuryakov). The team from Poolesville High School (Poolesville, MD), coached by Mark Estep, came in third (Jonathan Ni, Diwakar Ganesan, Kent Ma).



“All three of the high school teams were impressive. They developed very proficient code which exceeded my expectations for high school students,” said Jeff Rose (IDT), one of the judges.
In the Collegiate Division, first place went to the team from George Mason University (Sriram Rajaraman, Akshay Karthik,Brannon Crymes ). The team from Bucknell University placed second (Alexander Meijer and Christopher Rung).

“The purpose of this type of event is to promote student interest in Automated Software Testing through problem solving, teamwork and innovative technology,” said Thom Garrett, IDT contest chair. This year’s problem focused on designing and coding a very succinct API/Library in Java that could verify inputs and outputs. The top three high school teams earned cash awards for the Computer Science Departments at their schools, as well as electronic devices and T-shirts for their participation. The college team finalists received cash awards.
IDT’s annual programming contest is open to high school students in Virginia, Maryland, and DC. The collegiate competition is by invitation. For more information about future contests, visit https://idtus.com/contest/. More pictures of the event are posted on IDT’s Facebook page.