ProgComp Grand Final 2025

We asked the team, consisting of Year 11 students Nathan Z, Nathan Y and Summer, about the journey of ‘Molten Ice’.

How did ProgComp start at Knox?

“My personal journey with ProgComp started in Year 7,” said Nathan Z. “I formed a team with friends from other schools, and we were a few places off from making it into finals. In Year 8 we formed the Knox team ‘Molten Ice’, and came fourth. The next year we trained very hard and came first! This year we worked just as hard and managed to get first again. None of this would’ve been possible without the support of all of our parents and Ms Valent, for organising the competitions and being our point of contact.”

Describe your journey with ProgComp

“I first participated in ProgComp with Nathan Z and Summer in Year 8,” said Nathan Y. “We prepared for the competition by doing a lot of practice tasks under timed conditions. This gave us opportunity to develop an efficient strategy that allowed us to solve questions as quickly and accurately as possible, while also helping us work better as a team.

“I’m very grateful to Nathan Z and Summer for being wonderful team members and friends, to the teachers that have arranged the competitions and communicated with UNSW over the years, and to our parents who supported us, especially Nathan’s dad, who, in addition to using his programming expertise to help us solve difficult problems, has brought Nathan’s entire home computer setup to Knox and the Grand Finals at UNSW every year.”

“Our preparation largely involved preparation through 'past papers' which were public on the ProgComp website, and personally I was involved more in the mathematical/pattern finding aspects of the competition,” said Summer. “I'm grateful for Nathan Z and Nathan Y for being the best teammates I could have had for this competition. The training from Nathan Z’s dad was an invaluable aspect and critical to us winning, and will be helpful beyond my high school years.”

How was the competition, and what did it involve?

“The competition was a bit different from past years,” Nathan Z reflected. “There were five tasks of increasing difficulty, and we had to write programs to solve them. It’s a bit like solving maths problems but with a computer. In previous years, someone would come and manually check our answers. This year, our code would be submitted to the competition website and automatically checked — which meant it had to run in the time limit, making the tasks even more difficult. The problems were really fun, and challenging too!”

“The Main Round and Final Round both contain five programming questions of generally increasing difficulty, and you have two hours to solve as much as you can,” said Nathan Y. “This year’s Grand Finals had the additional challenge of time limits: your solution must provide a correct answer while being faster than a specified time, most commonly one second. In addition to working out a comprehensive strategy for each question, we had to make sure our program wasn’t wasting any unnecessary time either. It was a fun extra challenge that really tested our problem-solving skills.”

“There are more than 100 teams in the Main Round, of which only six teams are selected for the Finals,” said Summer. “The competition was extremely tight until the very end. We were around second or third when the tide turned and we submitted a solution that we thought would only get 3/10 but ended up getting 8/10, catapulting us to first place!”

What was the atmosphere of the room, on the day of the competition?

“All the competitors were very excited to be there,” said Nathan Z. “And nervous too — after all, ProgComp is probably the most prestigious programming competition for high schoolers. The teams were all really strong this year, so nobody was quite sure what the outcome of the competition would be. You can tell from the results — last year the scores were very spread out, but this year everyone was quite close!

“I knew almost everyone in the room, so it was nice to reconnect with friends from other states and compete against them. During the competition the atmosphere was pretty tense. Our team was ranked second until the last 15 minutes, so we were quite lucky to win.”

“Being in a room with a lot of extremely skilled programmers was a bit intimidating,” admitted Nathan Y. “Everyone was friendly, though. They were all just experienced coders looking forward to a challenge regardless of the result.”

“Everyone was very friendly,” said Summer. “One student made it all the way from Perth to compete in the competition, and we had a few Victorian teams as well. Everyone displayed great sportsmanship, and I look forward to competing again!”

‘Molten Ice’ had a fantastic approach that embraced the challenge and the process. Congratulations and well done to all involved!