Budding coders to excel at Premier’s challenge

14/07/2021

Vanessa Infanti and Georgina Lucas from St Anthony's School, Kedron, with their 2020 winning certificates

IT'S that time of year again when we encourage all our budding STEM students to enter the annual Premier's Coding Challenge.

BCE schools have an amazing track record in taking up the challenge with five of our students named as winners at the 2020 challenge.

Lucas See from Our Lady of Lourdes Primary School, Sunnybank, Vanessa Infanti and Georgina Lucas from St Anthony's School, Kedron, and Ava Smith and Skyla Birch from St Mary's College, Maryborough, were among a total of 16 students who received prizes for their coding skills.

The competition, now in its fifth year, is open to all school students from Years 3-10 with the focus this year on coding an interactive and innovative digital solution to raise awareness of digital wellbeing. This can include themes such as:

  • work and study life balance;
  • postural considerations of using technology;
  • personal security and safety online;
  • and adhering to social media ethics and protocols.

In 2020 Ava and Skyla took out the Year 7-8 Python/JavaScript/HTML Pairs category.

At the time they said they wanted to create a website that would be a centralised hub of all the information, games, quizzes, password generators and much more about being cyber secure and cyber safe for people of any age.

They said the purpose of CyberZone was to teach children and parents about cyber safety and cyber security in a fun and interactive way as well as to provide information as to where to find support," 

“Our website is now set up in our school library for everyone to use," the pair said.

Judges said their fresh approach to design was clean and demonstrated clear planning, adhering to many web design conventions.

The pair received a certificate signed by Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and State Education Minister  Grace Grace, a drone each and a development session, which involved a virtual excursion to Data3, IBM or Apple where they got to work with professional coders and developers to take the next step in scaling up their digital solution.

Meanwhile Vanessa and Georgina won the Years 5-6 Pairs Division and Lucas scored the Years 3-4 Scratch Pairs winner in a collaborative effort with a student from a state school.

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