The team of Ally Dauck, a senior computer science major, and Daniel Freburg, computer science master’s student, was among 5,570 teams from 62 countries that competed in the IEEEXtreme 16.0 global coding challenge. Their performance ranked in the top 25% of teams both globally and among U.S. teams. They ranked fifth out of 22 teams in the Central U.S. zone. The team was advised and proctored by Shukri Abotteen, instructional assistant professor, School of IT.

The IEEEXtreme 16.0 competition opened at 00:00 UTC and ended at 23:59:59 UTC on October 22, 2022. The competition is a challenge in which teams of up to three students compete throughout the 24-hour time span to solve a set of programming problems. Teams compete virtually from around the world.

During the 24-hour competition period, teams are presented with problems categorized as easy, medium, hard, and hardest. Teams are required to create, compile, and execute a program that reads input, processes it, and produces output to solve the problem. Solutions are evaluated and scored by experts. Scoring and ranking is based on the number and difficulty of problems they successfully solve during the 24-hour competition period.