It’s officially a three-peat for Pennington's "varsity" Computer Science Competition Club, who secured another international co-championship in the Senior Division of the American Computer Science League (ACSL) contest for the third year in a row, besting a pool of 125 other groups. According to team advisor Len Leib, who teaches both mathematics, computer science, and software engineering at Pennington, “As far as I can tell, such an achievement has never happened in the 45+ year history of this competition.”

Pennington had 25 students participating across the senior and intermediate levels this past April. The School’s senior level team was one of only three teams to earn perfect scores over four different sub-competitions, while the intermediate team of burgeoning computer scientists placed eleventh in their division.

For nearly 50 years, the ACSL has organized computer science and programming contests across the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Students are tested on fundamental concepts in computer science, ranging from number systems to Boolean algebra to digital electronics. In the upper divisions, each contest also includes a problem to solve by programming using Python, C++, or Java. 

Thanks to the School’s rigorous computer science curriculum, Pennington students are excelling at these challenges and boosting their confidence for college and the road ahead. “While correlation does not imply causation,” says Leib, “our strongest and most active senior team members will be continuing their computer science studies as majors or minors at some very selective colleges.” Siyi Y ’25 will be studying at Johns Hopkins, Aimee Z. ’25 will be attending Princeton University, Jenny Z. ’25 will be a student at Brown University, and both Ethan Q ’25 and Vanessa S. ’25 are heading to the University of Pennsylvania in the fall. 

In addition to the seniors pursuing related studies, other soon-to-be-graduates contributed to competition efforts, including Praslin H. ’25, Kelly L. ’25, Shreya M. ’25, Benjamin P. ’25, Rain P. ’25, Nate R. ’25, and Anir S. ’25. Other valuable team members included the following: Ella C. ’28, Cecelia E. ’26, Alex G. ’26, Monte H. ’26, Angelyn L. ’26, Ethan L. ’26, Samik M. ’26, William N. ’27, Rishabh R. ’26, Connor T. ’26, Shuhe T. ’26, Minnie W. ’26, and Iris Z. ’26.

Congratulations to all the competitors!