Some of the best young software programmers in the world attend a high school in Zagreb.
Geniuses – this is the perfect word to describe student software programmers from the MIOC High School in Zagreb who won the title of the best on the planet at the ACSL All-Star Competition held this week in Nashua, near Boston. There were 200 schools participating in the event, and the students say that the problems they were given were not even all that difficult, reports Večernji List on June 3, 2016.
“He took a pen, wrote the numbers 1, 0 and 9, and said. ‘Grandma, this is one hundred and nine.’ He was one year old at the time”, said Slavica Šinto, the proud grandmother of Dominik Fistrić. He made his family the proudest in the world with the success he achieved at his first international coding competition. But, they were not surprised at all.
“In the first grade of elementary school, he was already into coding. It is important to recognize the talent and support the child. Therefore, it was not hard for me to take him to the Zagreb Coding Association several times a week”, added his mother Nikolina Fistrić.
These guys are not practicing for several weeks or months before a competition. They prepare for years, sometimes coding up to 30 hours per week. Other members of the golden team are students of the first grade at MIOC, Gabrijel Jambrošić, Patrik Đurđević, Lovro Kalinovčić and Patrik Bošnjak. Students of the second and third grade Vedran Kurdija, Leonard Inkret, Petar Nizić-Nikolac, Paula Vidas and Ivan Stjepanović were members of the intermediate team which won second place, while seniors Adrian Beker, Robert Benić, Nikola Pintarić, Leon Starešinić and Domagoj Bradač comprised the senior team which was the best in its category.
Although they were pretty self-confident, they are still thrilled when they recall the moment when the winners were announced. They were laughing and crying at the same time. The reward was a tour of Harvard and of the famous MIT. They were amazed, but most of them still plan to go to a Croatian university. “Everyone asks me where will I go, and I tell them the Faculty of Sciences and Mathematics in Zagreb”, said Leon Starešinić. His reason for such a decision? “I simply like it here”.
