Cracking Coders

In the last week of the summer term, Shiplake College took a team of Year 9s to the final of the Open Schools Coding Competition at the University of Surrey in Guildford. The event, now in its third year, saw over 100 students competing in 17 teams. 

The competition involved pupils creating an app or a game for a charity. Our team consisting of Fergus, Jamie, Otis and Will chose to produce their app for the OddBalls Foundation, to help raise awareness of testicular cancer. Once completed all competing pupils had the opportunity to review each other’s apps and to present their own to the judges from Red Hat.

Whilst the boys did not come home with any prizes, their feedback from the judges was impressive: “The game itself looks really awesome, almost professional. You can tell a lot of time and effort was put into it. I imagine someone in their group has a lot of experience with game design as this looks a massively higher standard than the others.”

On the day our pupils also had the chance to attend a lecture from Stella Kazamia, teaching fellow in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Surrey, advocating the values of computer science and communal collaboration to the students. Charity partner Samaritans also ran a sprint session posing the question: “How can Samaritans use digital technology to help young people express themselves?”

Overall it was a fantastic day and a great experience.