St Mary's Junior School coders rank highly in national competition

Just before half term, a team of Year 5 girls (Ecoders) submitted their entry for the Young Coders Competition 2022 - a national competition for children in Years 4-8 to design and code an interactive computer game.

Using the ‘Scratch’ programming language, the girls designed and coded a game that helps raise awareness of environmental issues in accordance with this year’s theme, ‘My World, Our Planet’.  The girls worked on this project independently, in their own time during evenings and weekends, keeping in touch and collaborating with each other using Microsoft Teams. 

We have just learned the exciting news that our team have been placed in the top 20 nationally out of more than 600 entries, what an incredible achievement! 

The judges’ feedback was as follows:

‘An excellent game which covers all the judging requirements to a very high standard. A very well done game! I really enjoyed the idea behind it and a fact that 8 billion tonnes of plastic end up in the ocean and a suggestion on how to minimise single use plastic. I liked that the game had 2 Levels and that both had a strong environmental idea behind them. In Level 1, the moving net added a level of difficulty, but that certainly added to the excitement of playing the game. Instructions were nice and clear.’

Many congratulations to Emma C-R., Emily E., Gayatri K., and Brontë M. for their creativity, maturity, teamwork and, not least, their coding skills which have resulted in this amazing achievement against much older opposition.

Why not give their game a try!