The McLean High School Competitive Programming Club is buzzing with energy as they prepare for one of the largest and most prestigious events of the year: the MIT Informatics Tournament. Hosted at MIT in late January, the tournament is the premier programming competition for high school and college students, boasting 1,299 applications in 2024 and accepting 913 contestants. Following strong performances in 2024, McLean’s team is setting its sights on victory.
On Nov. 23, senior co-captains Aiden Feyerherm, Gregory Perrett and Eric Xue placed fifth out of over 300 participants at the Philadelphia Classic (PClassic), a semesterly programming competition for high school students at the University of Pennsylvania. Hot on the heels of their PClassic success, the team participated in the first USA Computing Olympiad (USACO) contest of the season from Dec. 13-16. USACO is a prestigious, online computer science competition for high school students. Competitors, divided into four divisions of varying difficulty—Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum—are given four hours to solve three programming problems.
Meanwhile, the MIT Informatics Tournament is known for presenting the most challenging of problems and fostering elite competition.
“We are planning on sending two to three teams of three to the MIT Informatics Tournament,” Xue said. “I’m not sure how we’ll do, because this is probably one of the largest and hardest contests we will attend so far.”
To prepare, the club has ramped up its training regimen.
“During meetings, we always do a practice contest,” Xue said. “Usually, these include very easy problems to give everyone the happiness of problem solving and harder problems to challenge more proficient competitors. We go over problems, how to solve them and contest strategies.”
As the countdown to the MIT Informatics Tournament continues, the club’s leadership is hopeful.
“Fifth at PClassic that time was nice, but I think we can do even better, especially during second semester when Aiden and I have more free time,” Xue said. “My expectation is that we keep getting better.”