Princess Sumaya University for Technology (PSUT) took 1st place in the Arab world and nationally, and 13th globally in the annual IEEEXtreme programming competition.

The university’s victory was won by the team of Esam Tuffaha, Muhammad Al Kilani, and Ahmed Hammouda, supervised by the Dean of King Hussein School of Computing Sciences, Ashraf Ahmad, and Firas Ghanem, according to a PSUT statement. 

The event was organised by the international IEEE organisation, with the participation of about 13,000 students making up 6,373 teams from 62 countries worldwide. 

Marking this victory, HRH Princess Sumaya, Chair of PSUT’s Board of Trustees, congratulated the winning team and the coaches on an achievement that confirms the university’s high global status. The princess praised the efforts of both students and supervisors, and their tireless pursuit of continuous excellence.

PSUT’s Acting President, Wejdan Abu Elhaija, commended the winning teams and their supervisors, and lauded this honorable achievement, which realises the ambitions and meets the directives of Princess Sumaya in preparing a young generation that has the skills to support their academic achievement and aid their entrepreneurial career success.

Ashraf Ahmad said how keen the university is to prepare its students every year to participate in such competitions, as is the case with local, regional, and global programming contests. The aim is to build students’ programming capabilities and enhance their creativity by presenting them with challenges of how to best invest and manage their time by tackling worldwide software problems, in order to find the best solutions for them.

The 24-hour competition is a global challenge in which teams of students from IEEE members compete with each other to solve a set of programming problems, the statement said. 

In the same competition, PSUT last year maintained its presence in the first eight teams, achieving 1st place in the Arab world and 7th globally. It was also crowned champion of the Middle East and Africa in the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC 2021), which was held in Moscow.

This year, PSUT’s team qualified for the ICPC 2022, to be held in the capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka, early next month. The team’s outstanding performance of programming skills enabled it to bypass the regional competition, to be held soon in the Arab Republic of Egypt, taking a PSUT team through to the finals for the sixth time, the statement concluded.