It is wonderful to see boys challenge themselves and extend their learning in Computer Science, gaining some very impressive results in the process.
The Easter holidays saw three of our boys win first place in the Lockheed Martin CyberQuest Competition, and this week we received news that Fifth Formers Will Reddy and Joe Travis, and Lower Sixth Former Varun Nathan, came third in the UK in the international Lockheed Martin Code Quest, which saw over 1,600 students take part from over 600 schools around the world.
The annual computer programming competition invites teams of two to three high school students to work together to solve problems using JAVA, Python, C#, and/or C++ programming to complete the “quest”. The competitions consists of 20 to 30 challenging problems created by Lockheed Martin engineers and computer programmers.
The Bedford School team were up against two other Bedford School teams as well as teams from other schools across the UK such as Churcher’s College, Bedford Girl’s School, and Bohunt Sixth Form.
Varun explained, “The competition gave us two and a half hours to code solutions for problems. There are 25 problems with each problem getting harder and worth more points. We worked in a team to solve the problems with two of us doing the easier problems and one of us working on a harder problem, which was worth more points. I was impressed we came third nationally, especially as I haven’t done anything like this before.”
Varun went on to say, “I like computer science and the teachers here are amazing. They give us a lot of support and find lots of opportunities and competitions like this one.”
Mr Paul Scullion, Head of Computer Science commented, “Obviously a keen aptitude for effective and fast coding is key, but so is strategy, selecting different problems to solve in the time-controlled event. The competition is split into two categories, Advanced and Novice depending on the coding experience of the students. To come third out of all the schools that entered in the UK in the advanced category is a great achievement.”
From September, our Computer Science department plans to run our own competitions with other Harpur Trust schools as well as schools from around Bedfordshire. The opportunity this affords to extending the boys’ learning is huge, encouraging them to problem solve and think in a computationally efficient way – a skill not only useful for their exams, but also for life beyond Bedford.