· Second consecutive year that School of Information Systems is organising the competition

· Objectives are to increase the students’ exposure to coding, and raise their awareness about career choices

More than 200 junior college and polytechnic students participated in the 2015 National Coding Championships organised by SMU School of Information Systems (SIS) for the second consecutive year.

Recognised by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) as a National Infocomm Competition, the National Coding Championships aimed to increase the exposure junior college and polytechnic students have to coding, and served to raise awareness among these students about the career choices available to those who pursue an education in information systems and computer science.

Students who signed up had to go to CodeCombat.com where they learned to "cast spells" to make other characters move around and complete missions in a wizard-themed environment, thereby picking up coding through an interactive and fun competition environment. Every mission completed would earn the students badges.

Based on the number of badges collected, the top junior college and polytechnic students were selected and invited to attend the live finals event held at SIS on 21 March 2015.

[Photo: Organised by SIS for the second consecutive year, the finalists had to pit their coding skills against one another in a fun and interactive two-stage finals.]

The finals were split into a morning session for the junior college students, and an afternoon session for the polytechnic students.

The first stage of the finals involved a pair-programming session where two students from different schools collaborated to work on an algorithm to compete head-to-head against other students. These teams competed in a custom Code Combat arena developed specifically for this event.

After practising their coding skills together in the Code Combat Arena, the students had an opportunity to answer a series of eight coding problems individually in the shortest time possible. Once students were done solving their own problems, they were assigned to mentor a fellow student.

SIS Associate Professor Chris Boesch, who organised the national coding competition, said "I enjoyed observing how the teams started off with very basic strategies at the beginning of the Code Combat arena event. Then over time, their strategies and sophistication began to evolve as the students learned more about the application programmable interface (API) that was available. About half-way through the event, the students were doing things that I had no idea how to do. While the students were working on complex algorithms and conditional logic, as a spectator, I was able to watch the players' armies attack each other and waited in anticipation to see who the last hero standing would be. I particularly enjoyed seeing the players raising the dead after epic battles and seeing them kill the Yeti which I thought would be invincible. Zombies, Yetis, and Griffen-riders - what could be more fun!"

CodeVantage, an SIS student-led initiative to help raise awareness of IT-literacy in youths, assisted Prof Boesch in promoting the competition. 

[Photo: Winner of the JC (top) and Polytechnic (bottom) category receiving their prize from SIS Associate Professor Chris Boesch.]

A student from Raffles Institution with the screen name GrandMasterWizard won the top prize for the JC category, while Tnay Teng Long from Republic Polytechnic took first place in the Polytechnic category.  

Said the RI student, “I found the National Coding Championship to be very interesting. You’re motivating people to actually code and learn coding. Normally when we are in school, it’s not very interesting when we’re given tasks to complete via coding, but CodeCombat.com gamified the whole idea of coding and people like it. I think there should be more emphasis on coding, which is a very interesting and useful skill to have.”