STEM-tastic!

Craig Vandervalk

The Victorian Coding Challenge (VCC) is part of the Victorian Challenge and Enrichment Series for high ability students.  The program is funded by the Victorian Department of Education & Training.

After completing Stage 1 of the VCC via an online platform, entrants were invited to enter the Stage 2 Challenge. Our teams travelled to Docklands to compete against students from other Victorian schools. This year’s theme was Agents and API’s (Application Programming Interfaces).

Students participated in computer science based puzzles and coding challenges using both Python programming and computational thinking. During the later parts of the competition, they had to code optimised algorithms in order to score as many points as possible. 

Four teams from Brunswick entered the 2023 VCC, and all of our teams were very competitive -  with one team inside the podium until the final round. Having full teams ensured each group could tackle the large number of challenges. 

The event was particularly demanding this year with more schools and students taking part, demonstrating the popularity and importance of the program. Our teams faced the tasks with enthusiasm, working together to meet the challenges.  It was great to see them actively engaged in the problem-solving tasks, while supporting each other to do their best. Persistence and Teamwork were the bywords of the day.

The BSC students really enjoyed this excursion, and overwhelmingly indicated they would give the event another go in 2024!

Overall what was your most memorable experience from the day?

Louis Erickson

Year 7

The bitcoin question was really fun, it was interesting to find out what would break the system and was rewarding when I finally got it.

Callum Martin

Year 7 

I liked using maths to solve a problem (not coding).

Finn Gourley

Year 7

I liked that it was a very social event and they just wanted it to be fun. I remember having lunch next to the river and also finally figuring out the hard challenges.

Lucinda Blackmore

Year 9

The Round 3 challenge did not go through, but I did create an agent that got  to the top of the practice Leaderboard all the times it was tested.

Benjamin Pianta

Year 9

Figuring out a hard question in Round 1that was worth a lot of points. This pushed our team up into 5th place at the time!

Thomas Beveridge

Year 9

The [Round 2 challenges] were similar to the challenges that we had been doing in class -  so we had an idea of how to solve them.

Peter Do

Year 9

Seeing Sanjin Dedic (the event creator) in real life was super surreal, he was super cool!