District UIL competitions took place March 25th-26th at the Woodlands High School, producing impressive results for CP. Students under Mr. Howard, Ms. Walton, and Mr. Anderson-White placed in the top three, giving them the opportunity to move onto the Regional UIL competition at Baylor University on Saturday, April 23rd. 

Computer Science, under the mentorship of Mr. Anderson-White, advanced two individuals and their team to regionals, junior Jack Pittenger placing first, senior William Kaiser placing third, and the team placing first. These individuals met weekly in preparation, practicing problem-solving and the ideal approach to problems. 

“As a competition, CS UIL is about solving a series of puzzles using code. For example, one of our problems was a game. There were two players which take turns. In the center, there are two piles of blocks. Each player can take as many blocks from each pile but has to take at least one. Whichever player is left with no blocks to take loses. The problem gave you the number of blocks in each tower, 10 and 15, 11 and 2, and asked to see which player would win, assuming optimal play,” Kaiser said. 

In the category of Mathematics, under the mentorship of Mr. Howard, Pittenger and Justin Huang placed third, qualifying for regionals. The Mathematics team also placed first. 

“Our team is excited to compete at regionals. We’ve all put in a lot of practice both individually as a team through data structure and algorithm studying,” Pittenger said.

In Number Sense, also under Mr. Howard, junior Olivia Ye placed first and senior Tom Thomas placed third, qualifying for regionals. The Number Sense team placed first as well. Olivia is unable to make regionals due to Internationals for DECA, but she is confident that CP will be able to qualify for state. 

“I had to sacrifice other competitions to be able to compete and I am glad it worked out. I advanced last year, but this is my first time placing first so I was pretty excited. I’ve done number sense since elementary school and it sparked my interest in math competitions,” Olivia said. “I will be helping to train my team so they are ready to compete. If I were still competing, I would definitely be looking forward to meeting my competitors and getting to travel to Waco. It was really hard for me to make the choice to drop Number Sense this year because I wanted to try to get to state, but hopefully, someone else from college park will be able to qualify for state.”