April 22, 2009
UWF JAVA PROGRAMMING TEAM TAKES FIRST PLACE IN THE JAVA PROGRAMMING COMPETITION
PENSACOLA-The University of West Florida UWF Java Programming Team of Gilbert (Ryan) Petris and Ryan Sharpe took first place in the Java programming competition at the 2009 Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP) National Collegiate Conference held in April in Oklahoma City. More than 600 participants attended and 13 different competitions were held. The Java competition was sponsored by State Farm Insurance and featured 30 teams.
Each team was provided with a problem statement and three hours to create a Java program to solve the specified problem.
"UWF has done well in the competitions held at AITP National in the past," said John Coffey, associate professor, Computer Science. "Teams representing the chapter have won the Java competition in 2003 and 2004 and earned several honorable mentions in a variety of events including Java Programming, Web page design and database design. Petris' and Sharpe's win this year was the first time UWF has won since 2004."
Petris is a junior majoring in computer science, computer information systems option. Before transferring to UWF, he earned an associate of arts degree from Northwest Florida State College in 2008. He currently maintains a 4.0 GPA. Petris is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force and attends UWF with support from the Veterans' Administration. He has written a graphical Internet Checkers game with a three-dimensional rendering of the checkers board.
Sharpe is a senior majoring in computer science, computer science option at UWF. He was awarded an associate of arts degree at Pensacola Junior College in 2006. Since then, he has worked toward his bachelor's degree at UWF while maintaining a 3.56 GPA in the Computer Science Department. When not studying, Sharpe writes video games for fun in several different programming languages, plays drums and guitar, and is a master welder.
For more information, contact Coffey at (850) 474-3183 or e-mail jcoffey@uwf.edu.
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