“Take Microsoft Office,” said Sentinel High School senior Daniel Hamilton. “There's a ton of programming behind it and most people aren't even aware how much programming is going on.”
Hamilton, his sophomore brother Josh and senior classmate Nick Wills see their computers the way cooks see food. Or, more accurately, like the guys in “The Matrix” movies who can look at streams of green letters and visualize the woman in the red dress they represent.
The contest started with a deceptively easy question: How do you make a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich?
Each contestant had to list the sequence of actions involved so a robot could follow them. Does the jar lid turn clockwise or counterclockwise? How do you line up the bread slices? One person offered the effective (but disqualified) idea: “Ask Mom.”
“When we were done, they took our solutions and tried to follow them,” said Josh Hamilton. “Even the best came out iffy, and none of them were very fast.”
From there, the teams moved on to more customary programming challenges. Using the Java computer language, they had to devise programs that could take a random assortment of playing cards and organize them by suit, or factor complicated mathematical formulas.
The judges looked for speed, efficiency, style and understanding of how to think like a computer.
“It's how my brain kind of works,” Wills said. “I think that way in class, going step by step, breaking things into rules and applications.”
To look at them, the Hamiltons and Wills don't come off as serious computer nerds. In an interview, Daniel sported a Whitworth College sweatshirt, Josh had his North Idaho Wrestling Camp T-shirt and Nick had a Headwaters Relay 2006 logo on his chest. All three run cross-country, wrestle and compete in track.
But unlike about 1,170 classmates at Sentinel, the three are members of the single computer programming class offered by Missoula public high schools. It's taught by the Hamiltons' father, Dave Hamilton, who's been struggling to keep the discipline alive.
“Back in the mid-'80s, we had seven sections of computer programming,” the elder Hamilton said. “Things like the National Science Foundation are concerned we don't have enough kids like this to meet the programming demand. They're throwing lots of money at scholarships and jobs to encourage more.”
In the team challenges, one student would type code into the computer, one would diagram programming ideas on a whiteboard and one would simply think aloud. Envisioning the solution mentally was as important as setting down the program.
The Sentinel students made another mark at the competition. While working through a competition problem, they discovered they had a detailed solution printed in one of their allowed resource books. All three opted to turn in the problem uncompleted, with the explanation that there was no honest way to prove they hadn't simply copied the answer.
That could have swamped their scores. Instead, it earned them a special prize.
“It's a huge deal to recognize that somebody makes an ethical decision with data like that,” Dave Hamilton. “These are the people who will be handling our Social Security numbers and bank records someday.”
Reporter Rob Chaney can be reached at 523-5382 or at rchaney@missoulian.com.
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