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.
