What is SkillsUSA?
Before I was nominated by Mr. Klins to participate in SkillsUSA, I had absolutely no clue what the organization was or what it did. But now I have a little experience and knowledge from participating in their district and state computer programming competitions. So, in this article I will be sharing those experiences for any future participants to reference.
District Competition
The district competition was easy. Basically we had to complete a program that was very similar to the Nocti Prep assignments that Mr. Klins assigns. If I remember correctly, I had to parse a csv file that held information on half a dozen basketball teams. The goal was to then create a bracket, putting those teams against each other in a fair way. I think this was done based on win rates, so the two teams that had the highest win rates would be put up against each other, and then the next two with the highest, and so on. The program had to print out the bracket that was created and the statistics for each team. So if you’re reading this because you want to prepare for the competition, you should (probably) be familiar with opening, reading, and parsing a csv file.
Another tip for the competition is this: You should make sure your program is in a working state or at least a state that prints something near the end of your time. When I competed in districts, I ran out of time while having an error in the function that printed out the bracket to the console. This resulted in ALMOST NOTHING PRINTING, and since the majority of the points come from the output of your program, I basically got zeroes all across the board. It’s a miracle that I won the district competition. Also don’t skimp on practicing comments! The use of comments is graded (for a ton of points), so make sure you know how to effectively use docstrings and normal comments.
Overall, districts was pretty fun for me, but I could have done way better. Also, if you go to districts they have tons donuts and coffee so that’s a big plus. 👍
State Competition
The states competition was amazing! I went to states with a group of about sixteen kids from different labs, and we had an absolute blast. We got food from tons of fancy restaurants, visited Hershey Land or whatever it’s called, visited the capital building, got ice-cream, stayed in a nice hotel, had a game night, and a ton of other cool stuff. However, my competition didn’t go as smooth as everything else.
In my competition, I had four hours to complete two programs. For the first program, I had to create a function that took two string parameters. With those two parameters it would find the smallest substring in the first string that contains all the characters in the second. This one was a little difficult, but I think I solved it flawlessly with beautiful comments.
For the second program, I had to create a program that basically made the user enter four quarterly sales reports for a company, and then it would print out four tables for each quarter with the data I inputted, as well as an extra table for the averages of all those quarterly reports. It did some other stuff too but I don’t really remember what. Anyways, I didn’t even get close to competing this project. I was using VB.NET Forms, and I wasn’t familiar enough with the stupid VB.NET arrays and lists to complete the project. If I could do anything different, I would have made the program console based and in python. Python has a much simpler syntax and I was much more familiar with it. The only reason I had decided to create a GUI in the first place is because contestants are awarded bonus points for it. I think around 25. So I guess the takeaway from this is that you shouldn’t get tempted by those 25 bonus points if you aren’t familiar enough to make a GUI.
Results
I ended up getting fourth place in states, losing by only four points. 🥲
Photos
Throughout the trip, everybody took a ton of photos. I thought it would be a good idea to share them with whoever reads this article, in hopes that they convince you to try competing in SkillsUSA.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/L828siNrHyZ7BDsW7
