The LCM Computer Science Team is already on the road to success for this year’s UIL academic season. They have already attended the “Kickoff Classic” at Seven Lakes High School and have been practicing on a daily basis.

“Officially we practice on Thursdays from 4:00 – 5:30,” computer science coach Terry Morris said. “The students who are working hard to make the team are constantly doing programming prompts or old tests. Currently we have about 25 kids competing for four varsity spots so it’s pretty competitive.”

The students with the highest written scores from the four practice meets before district will make the team.

“By doing it that way there is no favoritism and the competitors know that they earned the right to represent the school at district,” Morris said.

Last year’s team won District, Regionals, and placed fourth at the State competition. Junior John Comeaux and seniors Jonas English, Shri Murthy, and Jonah Boaz competed on the team last year. The team lost all of their members but John Comeaux, who is returning as the team captain.

“With John returning we have a strong team captain,” Morris said. “Hopefully we can put together a solid team that works well together before the district meet.”

Computer science is a subject many people don’t know about, but Morris said it is basically using a computer as a tool to solve a problem.

“The problem being solved could be anything from working with a data file to find and manipulate data or trying to get a Mario sprite to dunk a basketball over the ape from Donkey Kong,” Morris said.

The test is divided into two parts. The first part is a 40 question written test of material learned for the AP test in computer science. The second part is a team programming contest. Three of the team’s members make up the programming team and those three will share one computer and solve as many programming prompts as they can in two hours.

“Basically it requires a lot of practice on both the written tests and programming packets,” Morris said. “We have tests dating back about 5 years from previous meets that we are constantly working on.”

The team will travel to Clements High School on Nov. 14 to compete in their next competition. At this meet the team will go head-to-head with the top 4A team in the state and defending state champion, Needville High School. The students who will attend that meet are: John Comeaux, Matthew Cox, and Tyler Wolfford on team one and Thomas King, Lucas Russell, and Luke Hanson on team two.

“I think going up against that level of competition will hopefully push us to our limits so that at the 4A level we will be very competitive,” Morris said. “Simply put, I would like to win the state championship.”