Posted: 7:00 p.m.Saturday, March 28, 2015

TechOlympics champions help Lakota East to thirdconsecutive victory

By Eric Schwartzberg

StaffWriter

CINCINNATI — 

    Lakota East seniors ZachSchroeder and Liam Tiemon recently scored individual first-place wins inTechOlympics 2015, helping the school’s team reach the top spot in thecompetition for the third consecutive year.

    Schroeder and Tiemonwere among the 500 students from 34 high schools who recently took part in thisyear’s TechOlympics, the largest IT competition and expo for high schoolstudents in the area.

    Thirty-five studentsfrom each high school attended the conference with several students helping toplan and run the event, which was held at the Millennium Hotel in downtown Cincinnati.

    The three-day expo alsoallowed students to learn and hone their skills for potential careers.

    TechOlympics issponsored each year by the INTERalliance of Greater Cincinnati, whose missionis to engineer and execute experiences designed to inspire young talent topursue a career in the IT industry in Greater Cincinnati.

    Besides lectures byindustry leaders, breakout sessions on tech topics and one-on-one “IT&U”sessions, the conference also offered different levels of competition based ondifficulty. Students earn points for scoring anywhere between first and fifthplace.

    Many competed in avariety of IT challenges, with Lakota East stringing together not onlySchroeder and Tiemon’s first-place finishes, but also multiple second- andthird- place individual and team awards. The victories helped the school earnthe first-place trophy for the third straight year.

    Schroeder won hisfirst-place award for Mystery Coding, where students don’t know what realm theproblem might be in or what language they might be using.

    “It’s all kind of up inthe air,” said Dave McKain, Lakota East teacher and INTERalliance coach. “Inthe time given, Zach was able to solve the most challenges correctly.”

    McKain said Schroeder isa “top tier” computer science student who excels at problem solving and writingcode.

    “He had an internshiplast year at the Kroger data center in Blue Ash, so he wrote code for them overthe summer,” McKain said. “As a high school student, to get to do somethinglike that for a summer job is just pretty amazing.”

    Tiemon won first placein a new competition, Microsoft Touch Development, which gives students acertain amount of time to see how many different components they can get towork using a recently developed scripting language used for tablets andtouch-screen computers.

    McKain said thecompetition was well-suited to Tiemon’s way of thinking.

    “It fit his strengths,”he said.

     Tiemon said he startedtaking computer science his junior year at Lakota East because he neededclasses to fill his schedule, but admitted he had no idea what he was gettinginto.

    “It was a challengingclass that I really liked because I feel like in school I’m not challenged asmuch as I should be,” Tiemon said. “There’s a lot of problem solving, … itwasn’t a typical ‘find X’ that we did in calculus, it was like ‘find certain stepsthat you need to do to get to the answer’ and that really intrigued me becauseit was pushing my limits.”

    McKain said theINTERalliance program has been “a tremendous boon” by connecting talentedstudents while they’re still in high school to businesses and corporations inthe Greater Cincinnati area.

    “There have been anumber of leaders who have been visionary enough to recognize that if you wantto connect with this talent you need to make that connection while they’restill in high school, because once they go off to college then the amount ofcompetition that they’re going up against is pretty huge,” McKain said. “Bymaking these connections early on they’re able to keep these students aroundhere locally, and they’re discovery that’s a big deal for them.”

Lakota East and Lakota West’s TechOlympics champions

Lakota East

·                      Zach Schroeder - 1st place (Mystery Coding) and 3rd place (TopCoder)

·                      Liam Tiemon - 1st place (Microsoft TouchDevelop)

·                      John Thomas and Bobby Yost – 2nd place (Startup Creation Challenge)

·                      Stephen Koclejda – 3rd place (Academic Quiz)

·                      Aidan Cole – 2nd place (Microsoft TouchDevelop)

·                      Matt Manley – 2nd place (Wiki Races)

·                      Brandon Nguyen – 2nd place (Mockup Design)

·                      John Thomas, Austin Ahlborn, Zach Schroeder, Thomas Barlow, NoahPavuk, Jonathan Sharp and Aidan Cole – 2nd place (Showcase Project)

·                      Cooper Towns, Matt Manley, ClaytonAdams, Sam Bray, Zach Davis, Bobby Frazier, Nico Riccella and Robert Perry –3rd place (Showcase Project)

Lakota West

·                      Tiger Ji – 2nd place (NXT Robotics)

Thefollowing students are on the INTERalliance Leadership Council and participatedin the planning and administration of the conference:

·                      Lakota East: Taylor Paschal(director of chapter engagement), Sara Liang, John Thomas and Cooper Towns

·                      Lakota West: Stephen Liao (CIO of INTERalliance), Priya Thomas,Max Pflaumer and Mohamed Emlemdi