Anne Arundel Community College and Anne Arundel County Public Schools are accepting entries for the sixth round of the Anne Arundel County High School Java Programming Competition at the college.

            Individual and team registration begins at 2 p.m. Friday, March 16, in the Center for Applied Learning and Technology on the Arnold campus. The competition is a joint venture of the college Computer Science department and the AACPS computer science program.

            The March 16 event is the second meet of the academic year and open to students from all high schools in Anne Arundel County. Although the competition has an individual and team component, students must sign up as members of a high school team through their high school computer science teacher. Each school team may have three or four members.

            Schools must preregister to participate by contacting Rowland A. Brengle Jr., AACC associate professor and chair of computer science, at 410-777-2837 or rabrengle@aacc.edu. The entry deadline is Friday, March 9. Because this round is limited to 130 students, early registration is encouraged.

            In the first phase of the competition, students work individually on Java programming problems with a 30-minute time limit. After the individual competition, teams receive four Java programming problems of increasing difficulty to solve in 60 minutes. The top three individual scores of each team are added to the basic team total to arrive at a final team score. Ties are broken based on the time taken to complete problems.

            The December event drew 77 students in individual matchups and teams from eight county high schools: Annapolis, Arundel, Broadneck, Chesapeake, Glen Burnie, Northeast, Severna Park and Severn School. Severna Park High School won first place, Seven School placed second and Glen Burnie High School placed third.