Lower Sixth Formers Will Reddy and Joe Travis and Remove Former Fraser Morgan, celebrated a triumphant win in this year’s prestigious Lockheed Martin Code Quest Competition after competing against teams from the US, Poland and across the UK.
We also had two other teams of boys competing, one of whom achieved third place in the novice category and the other took third place in the advanced category.
Kevin Xu, whose team came third in the advanced category, tells the story in his review below:
Lockheed Martin’s annual computer programming competition, Code Quest 2023, recently took place around the world. In the whole competition, over 200 students from various continents participated, with Bedford School participating in Ampthill. Our school’s team emerged as champions at the advanced level, with a third-place finish in both the advanced and novice levels at the Ampthill competition sector.
During Code Quest, school teams use various programming languages to solve problems and win prizes based on the number of solved problems. The questions are designed to test students’ mathematical logic and programming skills, and our students used C# and Python to solve questions that ranged from 5 to 100 points. The questions involved techniques such as sorting characters, splitting strings, modulus calculations, and complex mathematical calculations related to topics such as ellipses and data/time transformations.
Teams, consisting of three people on each team, arrived at Ampthill at 8.30am. After a brief breakfast, the events team introduced the history of Code Quest, which was started in 2012 by Lockheed Martin’s Grand Prairie, Texas facility as a way to inspire high school students to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Since then, Code Quest has grown to become the world’s largest coding competition for high school students, with more than 3,000 students participating each year in locations around the world.
The competition started at 10.00am, and our boys worked tirelessly for two and a half hours to solve the challenging problems. The ‘Cache Hits’ team – Joe Travis, Fraser Morgan and Will Reddy, ultimately emerged victorious in the advanced category, scoring over 100 points and beating the second-place team by over 50 points. After the competition, the boys celebrated with a pizza feast before heading back to school. Their victory earned them a summer work opportunity at Lockheed Martin to prepare for university and work.
Throughout the preparation stage, our Computer Science department provided enormous support. Students were given lesson time to prepare for the competition, and teachers helped guide them when they got stuck. Additionally, the Head of Computer Science, Mr Forrester, set up a coding club during lunchtime for boys to practise coding on Code Wars and prepare for Code Quest. The competition improved skills such as teamwork and structured problem-solving, and we hope our boys will achieve even better results next year.
Congratulations to the winning teams:
- The Cache Hits – Advanced Level First Place: Joe Travis, Fraser Morgan, Will Reddy
- The Registers – Advanced Level Third Place: Kevin Xu, Jason He, Chuck Hu
- The Byte Optimisers – Novice Level Third Place: Ryan Cheung, Harry Wood-Rubio, Felix Beckmann