Last year, at the Cyber Robotics Coding Competition held at The Universities at Shady Grove, our team won the State Championship title. Our team was composed of Lean Madarang, Ife Obiora-Offer, Rafael Munguia and Kayla Donaldson. Check out the link below to see more of the event.
Yilaina Nichols and Lean Madarang represented St. Mary's School at the Cyber Robotic Coding Competition last Saturday, April 7, 2018 at the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington DC. They placed 13th out of 21 schools in the finals.
Schools from Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Washington DC participated in the competition. There were 51 schools registered for the preliminary round. In the first round, students learned to program robots through the CoderZ software. There were 56 missions to complete in this round. Student participation is very important in this stage for one of the criteria to qualify in the finals is the number of active students in each school, we are a small school and we were competing against schools with thousands of students. All the 6th, 7th and 8th graders participated in this round and that helped a lot in sending Yilaina and Lean to the final round. The second round was the Week of Code with 21 challenges, both Yilaina and Lean finished the challenges which qualified them to the finals. Out of 50 schools, St. Mary's ranked 14th.
The Final round, which was the competition itself had 21 schools competing. They had to do 15 missions for the first round for 90 minutes and 3 challenges in the second round for 60 minutes. It was challenging and our students did their very best. I am so proud of them.
Dear Parents and Guardians,
Exciting Technology News for Everybody
We have been invited by the Cyber Robotics Coding Competitions (CRCC) Intelitek STEM and CTE Education Foundation to participate in a Robotics Coding experience.
Middle schools students have free access to Robotic Coding software called CoderZ. This software enhances students‘critical thinking, problem solving and coding skills. Access is free for the time being for us to be able to learn the software and to be able to participant in a coding competition in DC on April 7. As of today, students are completing the Boot Camp in CoderZ; these activities show them the ropes of how to use the software. I encourage the students to finish all 56 missions for them to be able to get the most out of the learning experience. This Boot Camp will only be open until 11:59 EST on March 25. The next stage would be the Week of Code, which will run starting today, until 11:59 EST on April 1. Written below are the objectives and how they will monitor, score and consider the competition qualifiers.
Week of Code Objectives
· Complete missions (there are 21 in total)
· Score the most points
· Recruit more students to join to help your school complete more missions and score more points – Boot Camp is not required to join for Week of Code!
Week of Code Scoring
· Each student must complete at least 5 Week of Code missions to be considered an active participant
· Your school’s score – and what will be displayed on the Week of Code Leader Board – will be a weighted average score:
Total score achieved by all active Week of Code students in your school /the number of active Week of Code students in your school
· We will also monitor scores of individual students, looking for all-time high scorers
What’s at stake?
· Up to 17 invitations to the Finals event on April 7 at the USA Science & Engineering Festival are based on Week of Code performance!
I encourage you to encourage your children to participate actively in the learning experience. This competition will be held the first time in our area; to be able to be a part of it would be a great experience for the students and a good recognition for our school.
If your children are 12 years old and below, you need to give consent for them to be able to participate. I have already emailed the consent request; if you have not approved it yet, please do so. If you did not receive it, please let me know so I can resend it.
Students can do this at home and we can communicate through their Google Classroom. If they have questions, they can post it in the classroom and I will respond as soon as possible. We will do this in Technology class on Tuesday and if they want more time with it, I will stay until 5 PM in school on Tuesday, March 27. I know this will be within our Easter Break, but if students are interested, we can work out a schedule for us to train together; it could be a virtual meeting or a set school meeting.
I am excited for us to be part of the competition, so please encourage your children to participate.
Thank you,
Mrs. Lea Madarang
Technology Teacher
technology@stmarylh.org
http://gdc.gocoderz.com/#/account/login/
Computer Schedule
Tuesdays:
4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, & 8th,
Fridays:
PreK 4, Kindergarten, 1st, 2nd, & 3rd