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MU’s High School Hawk Hack

IEEE/ACM Club Hosts High School Hawk Hack 2024

Friday, February 16th Monmouth’s IEEE/ACM Club hosted the annual High School Hawk Hack. In only its second year post-pandemic, this event grew significantly to include over 50 students from 12 schools across the state.

More than a dozen IEEE/ACM club members organized, instructed and proctored the competition that has students compete in teams to solve a series of programming challenges. These challenges required the students to have a working knowledge of Java programming language. The results are then tallied by HackerRank, a platform with computer science problems, used by many employers to assess the coding skills of potential candidates.

At the conclusion of the event, the members of each winning team received technology-based prizes.

The 2024 High School Hawk Hack  winners:

First place – Middlesex High School

Second Place – Dwight-Englewood School

Third Place – Lakeland High School

Computer Science Professor Rolf Kamp, the IEEE/ACM club advisor, has been integral in creating this event that introduces high school students, interested in computer science, to a collegiate setting. Kamp states “It is clear the high school students, their teachers and club members thoroughly enjoyed the event. Hosting this event is an excellent opportunity to get students interested in Monmouth’s offerings.”

The IEEE/ACM club and the Computer Science & Software Engineering department hope that this event continues to grow for high school students pursuing a career in technology.

2023 HSPC hosted by Monmouth’s ACM/IEEE Club


For the first time since 2020, The MU Computer Science ACM/IEEE club hosted the Monmouth University High School Programming Competition. On February 24th, 34 students from 6 local high schools attended this event on Monmouth’s main campus.

After a lunch hosted by the Computer Science ACM/IEEE club, students were escorted to labs in Howard Hall where they were organized into teams of two or three in order to work on programming challenges. Facilitated by the ACM/IEEE club members, students were first coached through a practice session in order to become familiar with the development environment. Teams were then given 90 minutes to complete three challenges. Ranging from easy to extremely difficult, these challenges were designed by Monmouth University’s Computer Science ACM/IEEE club members.

Prizes were awarded to teams finishing in the top three positions. East Brunswick was the top finisher, and 2 different teams from Freehold High earned the 2nd and 3rd place positions.