Youth Coding 2018–2019 League Final Competition
GlobalHack’s Youth Coding League (YCL) is a twelve-week competitive coding club for middle school students that aims to increase confidence and interest in coding education and careers. The goal is to ensure today’s youth are ready to enter the growingly tech-centered workforce. Regardless of industry, many careers already require familiarity with technology to achieve success. This need will only continue to grow moving further into the 21st century.
Youth Coding League teams work with coaches, who are either teachers or parents, with additional support from industry mentors, typically software developers who volunteer their support and guidance. The students work with the coaches and mentors to build a game in Python, an object-oriented programming language, that relates to that year’s theme — this year, the theme was “Backstage Pass”. The Youth Coding League season ends with a spectator-friendly coding event where teams are faced with four challenges: a presentation of their final project and a code review, a live coding competition and a teamwork challenge. We were excited to have 12 teams compete in this year’s final competition!
Leading up to the competition, teams are asked to prepare a demo and present their final projects (Python-based games that had been built over the course of twelve-weeks), which they present to a panel of judges. Participants were asked to touch on their process and challenges in building the game, the roles each team member played and their takeaways from the program. To ensure the code behind the team’s game was well-written, a second panel of code review judges reviewed the games for individual components the teams could include.
That seems straightforward enough, but you might be asking yourself, “What’s a live coding challenge?” During this section of the event, teams were given two time-limited challenges, each fifteen minutes long, to show off the coding skills including in the Youth Coding League curriculum. For the first challenge, teams had to draw an image relating to the theme (think tour buses, microphones and guitars) using code. They were then judged on the quality of the image and how many lines, circles and other shapes they incorporated. The second half of the live coding challenge focused on the students creating a “Choose Your Own Adventure” game. Teams were challenged to create a text-driven game by writing lines of code and using if statements (and their imaginations) to create different game paths. While the teams were working, emcees provided live commentary for spectators who may have been unfamiliar with coding or the importance of computer science.
Teams then proceeded to the teamwork challenges. The first challenge involved students building a pyramid of plastic cups using a rubber band they manipulated with six pieces of yarn tied to it. After successfully building a pyramid, teams were then asked to form a circle, clasp hands and pass a hula hoop around the circle, without unclasping their hands. The third and final teamwork challenge required the students to stand in a circle, with their arms extended, palm up, towards the middle. A judge then placed a hula hoop on their fingertips and, without gripping it, the students were to lower the hula hoop all the way to the ground. The catch? They couldn’t talk the entire time! Teamwork was a factor in the scores for all the other challenges as well, but its importance in the technology industry cannot be overstated. Everyone’s got to work together!
At the end of the day, the judges had the difficult task of selecting the winners, but in the end, the winning teams and their associated schools were…
(*drum roll, please*):
- 1st Place: Longhorns 1, Parkway West Middle — Parkway School District
- 2nd Place: Fluffy Alpacas — Home-based
- 3rd Place: Nipher Middle School — Kirkwood School District
- Most Creative: The Hacking Catholics, St. Raphael the Archangel
- Best Theme: Digital Dynamite, Hazelwood Northwest Middle School — Hazelwood School District
GlobalHack would like to thank all of our participating schools (Carr Lane VPA, Chaminade College Prep, Crestview Middle School, Hazelwood Northeast, Nipher Middle School, Parkway West Middle, Rogers Middle School, St. Raphael and STEAM Academy), volunteers, coaches, staff, parents, participants and funders, especially Mastercard, for being part of our 2018–2019 season!
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