Coding Competition 2023

By Anush Kamath 5C

On Tuesday, 31st October we had an inter school coding competition. I was extremely excited about it, but also slightly nervous. The challenge was at St.Oliver Plunkett Primary School, all the way in Pascoe Vale. I took the train with my mum, others got there by car. When we arrived we entered a big gym with many tables and chairs. Upon arrival they offered us morning tea consisting of fruits, biscuits, cookies and muffins. At 9:15 I checked in with my 2 teammates. In my team were Chenyu, Ethan. F and myself. In the other Carnegie team there was Vaibhav, Arnav and Liam. The hosts were dressed up with Halloween costumes & explained the rules. After we were seated, we saw a trick or treating bucket with candies & three slips of paper that said “hint”. Those were to be used for the main challenge. If we got stuck, we could exchange 2 points for a hint to solve the question we had been stuck on.

Challenge 1:

In the first challenge there were worded problems to do with Maths and General Ability. It was all on paper so we hadn’t been allowed to use the laptops at all! My team was extremely quick and we solved 9/13 of the challenges with ease but slowed down towards the end and we finished with a total score of 10/13 which was still extremely good! In the challenge we had all contributed well and worked together fantastically which helped us get to our final result. 

 Challenge 2 , Main Challenge: 

In the main challenge we had to open a website which had loads of questions ( about 35 ) and in that our team started off extremely well, but unfortunately we couldn’t keep up with the other teams. We had appeared on the top 10 for about 2 minutes but got quickly wiped off. Even though our team was doing well, the other teams had been much faster and were able to solve much more than our team. The question that had wasted most of our time was the hardest question for every single team & nobody managed to solve it. We decided not to use any hints and save all of them for later on.

Challenge 3, Elevator & Barcode:

In the third (FINAL) challenge there were two separate parts. The first one was to open a link to a Scratch project & scan the barcodes which were given out to my half of the room. After you had scanned all the barcodes you needed to decode the words. My team absolutely smashed that and easily finished the first part of that challenge, but on the second one our scanner stopped working, which wasted time and forced us to ask for another one, which also didn’t work but our last one finally worked. Unfortunately, that had wasted 10 minutes out of 45 minutes and the timer rang. On the second challenge we had to open another project & edit the code to make it faster. It was called the elevator challenge because the project was making an elevator go faster and making people happy as they go up the elevator. Our elevator worked well, but once again we weren’t able to make it faster than the other teams. 

Results:

Unfortunately we did not come in the top 10. We had gotten 51 points while first place had 74! We hadn’t used any hints because we had thought that we would always just use it next, until it was too late. But overall the experience was fantastic & a great opportunity.