ICT

VICTORIAN CODING CHALLENGE

Back in October, a number of students took part in the first stage of the Victorian Coding Challenge run by the Mathematical Association of Victoria (MAV) in conjunction with Digital Learning and Teaching Victoria (DLTV). On completion, the students were given the opportunity to go onto Stage 2, a state-wide competition where the students would be required to work collaboratively on a “real world” coding application. McKinnon had four students who put their names forward to take part in Stage 2 - Nam Tran, Kevin Yu, David Le and Cameron Lai.

At the time of writing, we do not know the results of the voting. These are to be announced at the start of Term 1 in 2021. The following articles from Kevin and Nam gives you an insight into what the students thought of the experience.

The Victorian Coding Challenge has allowed me to think critically, and pushed my coding ability to the maximum. It was stressful at times, as the challenge took place in an exam period. However, the sensation of accomplishment when I finally archived the desired outcome made it all worth it. The competition was definitely engaging, and the prompt was challenging in a good sense. 

Kevin Yu, (Year 10)

In the Victorian Coding Challenge, we were required to develop two programs. One of the programs required us to take the information from a person's Wikipedia page and output their age (age at death if deceased), their gender and their profession between scientist, sportsperson and politician. The second program required us to create a quiz using the same information. Our group tried to create a fill in the blanks game, using sentences in a person's Wikipedia page.

I think the coding challenge was an excellent way to learn how to work in a group situation and required us to use our existing knowledge of Python as well as obtain new knowledge needed to complete the challenge. It was pretty challenging, considering that we had our exams during the month we had to work on the two Python programs.

Nam Tran, (Year 10)

Shirley Munro

ICT Teacher