Technology students at The Armidale School have excelled in an international website coding and design competition, placing them in the top 10 percent of students from more than 3000 around the world who participated.
Run by international teaching resource Grok Learning, the competition called Web.Comp 2017 engaged students over much of this term in both theory and practical applications. For the first four weeks, students learnt web development and design skills and completed increasingly complex challenges.
Seven Year 11 Software Design & Development students achieved perfect scores in the challenges, with George Lane in the beginners stream and Owen Chandler, Angus Cornall, Ryan Mitchell, Nicholas Moar, Hannah Van Roy and Julian Vogt in the intermediate stream.
In the fifth week of the competition students used the skills they had learnt to create website designs, using set content defined in HTML format and creating the look through design coding called CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).
“We had instructions on how to put it together and along the way had to complete several challenges,” Hannah said.
“The end goal was to design a website homepage that would be appealing and easy to navigate.”
Teacher Mr Christian Nexo said he was delighted that the students had done so well in the competition.
“Whether it be designing websites, creating apps or building software programs, computer science skills such as coding will be increasingly sought after and this competition was a great way of engaging and inspiring students in this field,” he said.
Head of the Technological and Applied Studies department Mr David Slade said that there was a variety of coding and STEM opportunities on offer at TAS including a Coding Club in Junior School and various electives in Stage 5 (Years 9-10) and 6 (Years 11-12).
Year 11 Software Design & Development students who achieved perfect scores marks in the Grok Learning website design challenge are (left to right) Julian Vogt, Ryan Mitchell, George Lane, Nicholas Moar, Angus Cornall, Hannah Van Roy and Owen Chandler
