Year 6 students from St Mary’s School in Cambridge are celebrating success at the Young Coders Competition 2023, after their coding team, the Ecoders, competed against hundreds of entrants from across the country to achieve an impressive second place.
The competition, which is organised by ‘The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists’ and is designed to raise awareness of careers in STEM, saw almost 600 entries submitted this year nationally. The theme was: ‘A Future in STEM’ and entries were open to children in Years 4-8, either individually or as part of a team. The premise was to design and code an interactive computer game using the ‘Scratch’ programming language.
Impressively, four St Mary’s students, Emma C-R., Emily E., Gayatri K., and Brontë M., worked on their project independently and predominantly in their own time during evenings and weekends. Judges noted St Mary’s team’s game was: ‘well thought out and educational’. They also said that it: ‘does a great job at introducing STEM to the target audience’ and that: ‘the code included was well-written, and the game functioned well’.
Charlotte Avery, St Mary’s Headmistress said: “At St Mary’s, our mission is to develop curious, creative, and compassionate young women with the aspiration, confidence, and integrity to help shape a better world. As part of this, we work hard to instil a passion for STEM in our girls from the minute they walk through our door. This includes specialist computer science lessons, which are introduced from Preschool. With expert teachers to help unpack assumptions about the sciences, and a state-of-the-art Junior School STEM Lab – offering everything pupils need to experiment, explore, design, test and perfect their innovations and ideas – we unlock a love of STEM subjects from an early age. Congratulations to the Ecoders on such an impressive outcome in this renowned, national competition. They faced stiff competition, but their creativity, maturity, teamwork, and coding skills, resulted in an incredible and well-deserved second place. Well done girls. Keep up the great work.”
St Mary’s coding team each received a personalised, engraved shield and a certificate for their efforts. They also secured a shield and prize of £100 for St Mary’s Junior School, which will be used to purchase additional resources to enhance the Computer Science curriculum.
