MARSHALL — Marshall High School senior Ashtyn Eben has been in Business Professionals of America for four years, and said her time at nationals was an excellent ending to her time with the activity.

Nineteen BPA students competed at nationals in Anaheim, California, earlier this month. Eben was national champion in Digital Publishing, Daniel Van Keulen took third in JAVA programming, and the Computer Animation team of Parker Terfehr, Simon Zahrbock and Izach Harris placed third. Top 10 finalists were Alex Gergen in computer modeling, Tyler Persons in Computer Security and Daniel Bauer in Database. The software engineering team of Gergen, Persons, and Dakota Edens were also top 10 finalists.

Terfehr, Bauer, and Persons passed national certification tests at nationals in Anaheim. Eben, VanKeulen, Bauer, Ignacio Larios and Trevor Fales also received Ambassador Awards.

Marshall BPA adviser Brenda Kellen said the students did great and represented Marshall extremely well. She noted that many MHS teachers have been instrumental in preparing the students to be exemplary in their BPA contests, which include assistant coaches Marcia Ivers and Jan Timmerman; Marty Brandl, computer science teacher, in being a resource for those in programming contests and English teachers who are always willing to proofread documents and work with the video production and digital media students.

“It is truly a building-wide effort, and our kids would not be as successful as they are without the help of everyone,” Kellen said. “Business people in town help students with their learning projects as well. For instance, Tyler Persons works at Starpoint Communications where he applies and expands his knowledge in computer networking and security, which are the areas he competed for in BPA. Many of the kids who competed at nationals spent countless hours taking what they learned in the classroom from a class they had at MHS and then teaching themselves even more.”

Eben said Digital Publishing involves a two-hour test in which competitors are presented with jobs to complete using PhotoShop, InDesign and Illustrator.

“Jobs include things like making logos, fliers, menus and the like,” Eben said.

For Computer Animation, Terfehr said the team was tasked with creating a two-minute animated video for an Olympic snowboarding event called the halfpipe.

“Last year we ended up placing fourth at nationals and through that we were able to learn from our previous mistakes and use the judges’ comments to better our animation and presentation,” Terfehr said.

In his JAVA competition, Van Keulen said around 60 competitors were given a problem they needed to solve by using computer code.

“At nationals, the problem was creating a traffic light that would change color when you clicked a button,” Van Keulen said. “We had an hour-and-a-half to write a program that would do that completely from scratch.” Van Keulen said he took a lot of practice tests from previous years to prepare for nationals to get a good sense of what kind of problems may be asked.

Eben said she enjoys getting to be create in her event, coming up with her own designs to match the prompt.

JAVA programming is something Van Keulen loves to do.

“It’s all about creative problem solving, and I love to do that,” he said. “It’s definitely not easy, but I find the challenge of it very fun. The competition at nationals was pretty tough. A lot of the people there seemed to have a lot more experience than I did.

“I was very nervous going into the testing room.”

The Computer Animation team liked coming up with the ideas for the video and seeing how it would be executed, Terfehr said. Terfehr said he did all the technical stuff for the video — basically everything that is seen visually, while Zahrbock and Harris did the voiceover and concept ideas.

By the time awards were being presented, Eben said that honestly she was so tired she could barely stay awake.

“When they announced my name, I hardly heard it, I had to look around to see if anyone else was moving to be sure I heard correctly,” she said.

“There were definitely a few happy tears shed on my way back to my seat.”

Terfehr said there were a lot of great videos this year in his team’s category.

“When we learned that we got third place, we were all excited and relieved that our video did that well,” Terfehr said.

Van Keulen said she was completely shocked when he got third place in JAVA.

“I walked out of the test not even knowing I would get in the top 10,” he said. “When I found out I placed third, it was pretty overwhelming. It was really an awesome moment for me.”