The Computer and Information Department has had a busy yet very successful year once again. This year students participated across a wide range of activities and competitions; locally, nationally and internationally. The Computer and Information Department was once again involved in the Canterbury Computers in Education Society competition that was run at the University of Canterbury on Sunday 30 August. This year we entered a number of teams with high expectations.

Sam White and Chris Wong won the Senior Programming competition were the Programming Category winners and also won the Allied Telesyn Trophy for best overall performance in Programming.

Gerard Watson, Matthew Smith, Richard Nesbit and Ian Loh were ‘Highly Commended’.

Mitch Dodge and Leif Burnett-Christensen were ‘Highly Commended’ in the Robotics Competition.

Chris Brunt, Caleb Withers, Tim Ferguson and Bronson McNaughton who were placed first in Multimedia, won the overall multimedia category and were awarded the Deloitte’s Trophy for best overall performance in the Desktop Publishing and Multimedia categories.

The CIS Department participated in the ICAS (International Competitions and Assessments for Schools) in the general computer skills section. This focused on: common operating systems and hardware, word processing, graphics and multimedia, spreadsheets and databases, internet and email, and programming and scripting tasks. The Department has once again significantly out-performed the national average in ICAS. The test is sat by students across New Zealand.

The Computer and Information Science Department also had entries in two premiere programming competitions, the Australian Computer Programming Competition (ACPC), and the New Zealand Programming Contest (NZPC).

Team Kugatsu scored 42 points, placing them in fifth place in New Zealand. The winning team had 69 points. Team Kugatsu made 6 attempts at a 30 point question, had they succesfully completed it they would obtained first place.