Participating in a LASA-hosted programming competition, 21 Westwood Computer Science students competed against 14 schools and 119 students in a three-hour rigorous handwritten programming challenge. Among those 21 students, six placed within their events: Aarya Agarwal ‘21, Anavi Nayak ‘21, Luke Gretta ‘18, Kevin Li ‘18, Sean Thomas ‘12, and Cetan Copeland ‘19.

“I’ve liked it [coding] since I was in 7th grade,” Agarwal said. “I just took a Codecademy course on Python and made some simple games on my computer and I started liking it.”

Scoring in the novice category, teammates Agarwal and Nayak shocked everyone by out-competing three other schools without a third member, which is usually a severe handicap. The team achieved a second place victory. Agarwal also secured another second place score in the individual novice competition.

“I think a third member doesn’t help as much because there is a lot of coordination needed when you’re solving coding problems, so two people is a good number,” Agarwal said.

Students also placed in the advanced categories, bringing home multiple awards. Westwood participants and their achievements are listed below:

Novice Category

* 2nd Place Novice Team (Aarya Agarwal, Anavi Nayak)

* 2nd Place Novice Individual (Aarya Agarwal)

Advanced Category

* 2nd Place Advanced Team (Luke Gretta, Kevin Li, Sean Thomas)

* 4th Place Advanced Individual (Kevin Li)

* 6th Place Advanced Individual (Luke Gretta)

* 8th Place Advanced Individual (Cetan Copeland)

Participants

 + Aarya Agarwal

 + Cetan Copeland

 + Jeffery Fan

 + Louis Fernandes

 + Luke Gretta

 + Gabe Hill

 + David Kwak

 + Kevin Li

 + Richard Liu

 + Derek Lu

 + Nalin Mahajan

 + Altan Nagji

 + Sid Nair

 + Anavi Nayak

 + Hrithik Ochani

 + Anthony Pham

 + Sean Thomas

 + David Xu

 + Kevin Yang

 + Angela Zhang

 + Jenny Zhang