Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Blast from the Very Far Past

A team of programming pundits from Las Cruces High School took top honors Wednesday in the New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The students -- Melissa Preciando[1], Jessica Humphrey and Liz Holland -- spent the academic year developing their simulation, which depicts how temperatures and thermodynamics inside a house are affected by fluctuations in outside temperatures for six hours.

Las Cruces High won a DEC pc486 personal computer and software donated by Digital Equipment Corp., and each of the students received a $1,000 savings bond. The team's teacher is Terry Delzer. Las Cruces also received advice from two technical coaches at New Mexico State University, Prof. Howard Julien and Will Baird.

1. That ought to be Preciado.

Read the ancient press release here.

How I got drafted in to that was rather interesting. It wasn't my intent to be a coach for the team. I was actually looking to try to be a teacher's assistant at LCHS. Melissa and I had been friends prior to this. I just helped guide their ideas through NMSU to get a technical mentor...and then helped a little more...and a little more and then ended up effectively coaching the team by translating what Dr Julien was giving them to what they could work with and teaching them the coding that they needed to use the Crays and CM-200. I ended up involved with the program for the next five years.

FWIW, yes, it's that Melissa. :S


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