The Programming Challenge for Girls is a competition for year 10 girls. The aim is to encourage more girls to take an interest in programming. The girls were given lessons to assist them to learn Python. They then competed against other year 10 girls in an event held at the University of Canterbury. The girls were required to write programs in Python to solve several different problems. These were then uploaded to the judging site which tested them automatically against its own test data and they were awarded points for any correct solutions.

Lincoln High had 2 teams entered in the competition where they wrote code for 2 hours under contest conditions. We are very proud of the performance of both teams.

As usual, there can only be one winner. The Armadillo’s at a Bridge Team from Lincoln High came first in the Canterbury region and a close second in the regional competition, piped by one attempt at a problem by an Auckland team. The second team also performed well overall but did not place in the top three. The Armadillos have been offered further training with a view to becoming part of the NZIO (NZ Informatics Olympiad) Team, possibly representing New Zealand in future years.

All the girls enjoyed the experience immensely and are keen to enter other competitions, like the Canterbury Programming Contest for all year levels which runs each year in September. They can certainly hold their own in a programming problem solving competition like this!

Well done everyone!

Report by Mrs Davey in C6 (TIC Digital Technologies)

Article added: Thursday 02 December 2021