ICT

2017 GROK NCSS PROGRAMMING COMPETITION

The 2017 Grok NCSS programming competition saw 28 McKinnon students from Years 7-11 competing in this five week intensive challenge, many with enormous success. In fact, Grok contacted the school this week to say that five students from McKinnon Secondary College came in at the top of the leaderboard with Perfect Scores! These students are Rose McCallum, Persephone Gardiner, Karleen Han, Harry Mills and Lavie Kolchinsky. I could not be more proud of these students.

It was great to see a number of Year 7 students taking up the challenge which, for many of them, would be their first programming competition. It was also great to see some Year 11 students who are “old-timers’ to the Grok competitions still taking part and improving their python programming skills. McKinnon is recognised as a “Champion School” by Grok Learning because of our continued participation in the various challenges and also because of the outstanding achievements of some of our students. The students below performed particularly well in this year’s challenge:

Year 7 Newbies

Harry Mills - Perfection

Jenny Huang - Perfection

Lavie Kolchinsky - Perfection

Persephone Gardiner - Perfection

Ron Shamrak - Perfection

Rose McCallum - Perfection

Grace Wang - High Distinction

Gregory Liarakos - High Distinction

Matthew Day - High Distinction

Sai Waller - High Distinction

Year 7 Beginners

Stephanie Georgantas - Perfection

Maya Ben-Harim - Perfection

Year 8 Beginners

Marisha Dinesh - Perfection

Tal Rabani - Perfection

Year 8 Intermediate

Karleen Han - Perfection

Michelle Gu - Perfection

Year 9

Roger Hao - Distinction

Year 11 - Intermediate

Shay Sheffi - Perfection

Evan Wang - High Distinction

Here is what some of the students had to say:

I did the NCSS Beginners Challenge over five weeks. It was a great learning experience as well as a great test for perseverance because this was my first attempt at the competition and I found it extremely challenging at times. However, there were always tutors who were happy to guide me which resulted in my completion of all the tasks. I would really recommend you to do it as it was very interesting as well as because coding is a useful skill to learn for the future.

Marisha Dinesh, 8B

The NCSS coding challenge was a blast! Learning to code through the small, digestible modules, and then applying those skills in coding problems was great fun. Over the five weeks of coding, I went from basic code like print ("Hello, World!") to making a program that would do my poetry homework for me ;). This coding course helped me develop my problem solving and logic skills, by constantly challenging me and balancing the right amount of fun and learning (and coding, of course!). Coding is so much fun!

Karleen Han, 8E

The thing about the NCSS Challenge is that it isn't just a challenge, it's fun too. Little Easter Eggs from other movies or books made it all the more enjoyable. The challenges started off at a good level and as you progressed they got harder, but there was always help provided if things got too hard. I didn't know much about coding and the NCSS Challenge was a great experience.

So if you like challenges, learning new skills and making a digital turtle move then you should try the next NCSS Challenge!

Persephone Gardiner, 7G

I found the NCSS Python Programming Challenge interesting, engaging, and a bit difficult. It was hard to find what was wrong when my code didn’t work, and it took a few attempts to get it correct, but eventually I did so. When I completed a question or a week in the challenge, I felt a great sense of accomplishment and achievement. Throughout the five week challenge, I enjoyed watching my code transform into something meaningful. It was exciting to try something new and out of my comfort zone, and I feel that I have learnt a lot and gained much more knowledge in the area of computing than I previously had.

Grace Wang, 7B

During the five weeks NCSS challenge, we answered a lot of questions about programing. They started with very easy questions, and then progressed to difficult ones. I spent more time on problem solving questions. In the fourth week, I found the questions were really difficult, especially the 'turtle' task, because every time I tried to work out the angles, I always got the wrong answer, so I had to do it all over again. Then I went to see Mrs Munro for help. She would give me a tip, and then I would be able to work out the problem. She made me feel a lot easier. The problems were not really that difficult, you just needed to know how to fix it. I think when we are doing challenges, we should be calm, and pay attention to the questions and know what to do next.

Jenny Huang, 7D

Shirley Munro

ICT Teacher