Computer science students found themselves in a showdown with their professor, Giselle Reis, at the Google Hash Code programming competition. Student teams entered the competition to test their mettle against coders across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and instead found themselves in a race against their mentor.

Hash Code is a team programming competition for students and industry professionals across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Reis, who is an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, has organized the CMU-Q hub for the competition for the past two years. The first year, Reis organized the students during the competition, and found herself with time on her hands while the students programmed. Since she had not registered with Google as a competitor, she could not participate.

For this year’s Hash Code, Reis signed up as a competitor as well as a hub organizer. Nearly 20 students attended the event, and to their surprise, they found Reis competing alongside them. When she submitted her solution, she was first among all of the CMU-Q teams. “They spent the rest of the competition trying to catch me,” Reis said. “One team came very close.”

While the event was a fun way to practice their coding skills, Reis noted that competitions like this have an important purpose. “These are the kind of problems that students will face in the workplace,” she said. “In the classroom, we give structured problems so the students will learn specific concepts. This type of open-ended challenge makes them apply their knowledge.”

Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science (SCS) is a world leader in computer science education and research. The Carnegie Mellon campus in Qatar offers two undergraduate SCS programs: the bachelor of science in computer science and the bachelor of science in computational biology.