Last October 28, 2016, the Young Software Engineers’ Society held its 8th Get 1/4! The Pen && Paper Programming Challenge, in partnership with Azeus Systems Ltd. The event was held at the Math Building Lecture Hall, which started at 7:00pm.

For more than seven years, YSES has been conducting the said pen and paper programming challenge to improve and exercise the participants’ programming skills and critical thinking. It also aims to train the participants to solve programming problems and develop working algorithms without depending on compilers and interpreters.

This year, the event kickstarted with two mini-programming challenge on Facebook (FB) as teaser to the main contest. Students who participated in the game wrote their answers on a ¼ sheet of yellow paper and submitted their entries at the YSES convergence area. Two winners per mini challenge were announced as winners, namely: name 1, 2, 3.

The teams who participated in the main game were composed of two to three students. They were to collaborate to solve the problems at hand. The contest consisted of two rounds. During the first round, the teams chose and answered programming-related questions for programming languages C, JavaScript and Python from a question pool.

In the second round, the teams were given a set of problems to be solved using the said languages and using only pen and paper. They will have to manage their time in order to answer as many questions as they can, given the limited amount of time. During this round, the competing teams were tested as their answers should work without the help of compilers to help them figure out the answers, especially to questions where they were asked to write a code about a certain problem domain.

During the contest, another mini-game was conducted to test the students’ familiarity with different programming languages. The teams were asked to write one line of the code for printing “Hello World!” in 22 various programming languages. Some of the the languages that were featured are Go Lang, R, Ruby, and Erlang.

Out of the 14 teams who participated in the event, the winners were narrowed down into three. The (Michael Arvin Jay Braga, Leensey Lawas, Charlene Quiz), Team D-Axis (Jan Charlene Adona, Darius Orias, Julius Jireh Vega), and Team MIGUI’S BUDDIES (Jose Miguel Castillo, Rainier Francis Tomista, Cid Rembrado Darum), respectively. All winning teams bagged certificates and cash prizes worth P5000 for the champion, P3500 for the first runner-up, and P1500 for the second runner-up. All teams were given gift certificates from the event’s sponsors.