Shropshire students pick up second prize in national coding competition featuring more than 500 schools

The 10, form four students were from Acton Burnell-based Concord College and in the competition, run by Codementum, the group had to work as a team to solve 30 puzzles as quickly as possible by identifying and using coding solutions.

The members of the team were 14-year-olds Cyril Chan; Tim Giles; Mariia Lukanina; Noah Murray; Taya Neviadomska; Kenshu Suzuki; Zoie Tsang; Caden Wong and Thomas Ye.

Codementum is a game-based computer science platform developed by experienced teachers from the UK, US and Europe.

It was established with the basic goal of teaching coding to children between the ages of eight and 16.

The platform, forming a basis for advanced computer skills required at primary and secondary education level, is designed to improve algorithmic and computational thinking skills of students.

Concord computer science teacher Tim Curtis said 514 primary schools – featuring a total of 1,244 different classes, took part.

Each of Concord’s computer science classes in forms three, four and five competed in the competition during lessons.

He said: “The group that achieved the second placing worked extremely well as a team, sharing individual expertise to ensure the whole class could keep moving forward.

“Every student effectively embraced the puzzle environment and applied efficient computational thinking skills to progress through the increasingly difficult stages.

“They not only managed to complete the puzzles quickly, but patiently coached others to find solutions without simply giving them the answers.

“They should be proud of their achievement and confident in their ability to succeed in their computer science international general certificate of secondary education.”

By achieving second place, the team has won a Codementum subscription for the whole of Concord’s lower school, a twin coding kit for the class and a twin mobile app subscription each.

Reflecting on the competition, Noah said: “Overall, the competition was an unexpected success, but a welcome one. It focussed on the collective ability of the class to code precisely and efficiently.

“I think it’s fair to attribute our success to both the individual and combined efforts of everyone, and the fact that we all completed the 30 challenges in a very short space of time, taking care to be as efficient and accurate as possible.

“I hope we can take on some more challenges like this in the future and that the other computer science students benefit from the online resources that we won for all students in the lower school.”