2025 High School Hawk Hack Announcement
We are excited to announce that this year’s competition will take place on Friday, February 7, 2025 from 11:30-3:00 at Monmouth University’s School of Science building in West Long Branch. Participants will be required to secure their own transportation to and from the competition.
Tentative schedule of event:
11:30-12:30 – Welcome / Registration / Lunch
12:30-1:00 – Practice sessions
1:00-2:30 – Programming Competition
2:30-3:00 – Wrap up and Results Below is a quick description of the competition:
The competition consists of a set of programming problems. Teams should strive to correctly solve as many problems as possible, as quickly as possible. There will be exactly one and a half hours to work on the solutions. Each school can send up to two – three person teams to the competition.
Each team will be assigned to two computers in a particular lab and issued appropriate login and password credentials. We have allocated two computers per team to encourage a “divide and conquer” process with different team members tackling multiple problems rather than working on one at a time.
The Java programming language will be used to solve all programming challenges. Code must be entered in real time using university computers with the Eclipse integrated development environment. Access to textbooks and JDK documentation is permitted. Participants may not use their personal computers or mobile devices.
I look forward to meeting you at the competition!
Rolf Kamp
Specialist Professor
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering
IEEE/ACM Club Hosts High School Hawk Hack 2024
Friday, February 16th Monmouth’s IEEE/ACM Club hosted the annual High School Hawk Hack. In only its second year post-pandemic, this event grew significantly to include over 50 students from 12 schools across the state.
More than a dozen IEEE/ACM club members organized, instructed and proctored the competition that has students compete in teams to solve a series of programming challenges. These challenges required the students to have a working knowledge of Java programming language. The results are then tallied by HackerRank, a platform with computer science problems, used by many employers to assess the coding skills of potential candidates.
At the conclusion of the event, the members of each winning team received technology-based prizes.
The 2024 High School Hawk Hack winners:
First place – Middlesex High School
Second Place – Dwight-Englewood School
Third Place – Lakeland High School
Computer Science Professor Rolf Kamp, the IEEE/ACM club advisor, has been integral in creating this event that introduces high school students, interested in computer science, to a collegiate setting. Kamp states “It is clear the high school students, their teachers and club members thoroughly enjoyed the event. Hosting this event is an excellent opportunity to get students interested in Monmouth’s offerings.”
The IEEE/ACM club and the Computer Science & Software Engineering department hope that this event continues to grow for high school students pursuing a career in technology.
2023 HSPC hosted by Monmouth’s ACM/IEEE Club
For the first time since 2020, The MU Computer Science ACM/IEEE club hosted the Monmouth University High School Programming Competition. On February 24th, 34 students from 6 local high schools attended this event on Monmouth’s main campus.
After a lunch hosted by the Computer Science ACM/IEEE club, students were escorted to labs in Howard Hall where they were organized into teams of two or three in order to work on programming challenges. Facilitated by the ACM/IEEE club members, students were first coached through a practice session in order to become familiar with the development environment. Teams were then given 90 minutes to complete three challenges. Ranging from easy to extremely difficult, these challenges were designed by Monmouth University’s Computer Science ACM/IEEE club members.
Prizes were awarded to teams finishing in the top three positions. East Brunswick was the top finisher, and 2 different teams from Freehold High earned the 2nd and 3rd place positions.
