A three-member team from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology won Grand Champion honors at the 2010 Carnegie Mellon University Spring Programming Contest hosted by Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science with support from IMC Financial Markets.

The Rose-Hulman team of Eric Crockett, Matt Iverson and Ching-Chen Ma was one of 19 teams from a dozen colleges and universities that participated in the seventh annual competition, which complements the International Collegiate Programming Contest sponsored each fall by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).

This year, the spring contest was a two-day affair, with a workshop on March 26 that featured technical talks as well as a full, five-hour practice contest at which team coaches were welcome.

"The support we received from IMC was gratifying," said Gregory Kesden, an associate teaching professor of computer science and organizer of the annual contest. "Not only did they enable us to offer the Friday workshop, but they also presented technical talks. It's nice to have sponsors who are willing to roll up their sleeves and be part of the event."

During the contest, each team was presented with a set of nine problems. For each problem, the teams had to identify an appropriate problem-solving method, or algorithm, design a data set and produce a computer program to solve the problem. Scoring was based on how many problems each team solved and the amount of time taken to solve them.

Many of the problems were devised by members of the Dragons, the Carnegie Mellon team of Si Young Oh, Yun Dong "Stanley" Yeo, and Dan Schafer that competed earlier this year in the ACM World Finals in Harbin, China.