Campus Connection

UW-La Crosse students fared well during a Midwestern competition held on campus. The students participated in the 2017 Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium (MICS) April 7-8. The event brought more than 250 students and faculty from the Great Plains and Midwest to present talks and posters. In addition, teams of students competed in a robotics challenge and a programming contest. In the programming contest which ran for three hours on Friday evening, teams competed to see who could solve the largest number of problems based only on their own programming skills with no access to Internet resources. In the contest featuring more than 60 teams with more than 180 students, UWL students made up three of the top 10 finishers. Overall winners were the UWL team of Andrew Gregory, Walter Verburg and Kevin Minter. The team of Suzy Ratliff, Phuong Nguyen and Bryan Ebben placed third. Both teams took home cash prizes donated by Fastenal. In addition, UWL master of software engineering student Cameron Ario won the Best Graduate Student Paper Award for his paper, "Job Board — A Web Based Scheduler," which included work done with Computer Science Professor Kasi Periyasamy. The symposium is one of the oldest conferences on the subjects of education and computing. MICS celebrated its 50th anniversary at UWL which has hosted the conference a number of times in the past.