Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Students place 1st in computer coding event
VALLEY FORGE >> Coatesville high school students took first place in their division of a computer coding competition.
Code Quest is an extremely challenging computer coding competition hosted by Lockheed Martin. This was the first year that was held at its Valley Forge location. There were 20 teams of two or three high school students competing in one of two divisions, novice or advanced.
Coatesville Area Senior High School sent a team of three seniors, including Nathaniel Bream, Mitchell Henderson, and Joshua Ramos who wanted to compete using the Python programming language. Teams could choose to program in Python or Java and their division was determined by the amount of time they had spent learning their chosen programming language. The advanced division was made up of
students who had been programming in the language for more than a year and the novice division was for students who had been programming in the language for less than a year.
When Coatesville registered
for the competition, only one of its members had any experience using Python. The three of them had to work very hard from mid-February through April to learn the language. They started to practice as individuals to focus on building knowledge. As the competition approached, they began to work through challenges
as a team, using one computer to simulate the competition. Bream, Henderson, and Ramos established roles for themselves within the team.
Coatesville’s team members told their coach, Patrick Sheehan, before the competition on May 14 that they were going in it with low expectations and they just wanted to enjoy the experience. They didn’t know that they would exceed their low expectations by winning.
Many of the Lockheed Martin employees noted that the students kept saying they were not nervous, but said so in a nervous tone.
“We walked into the building armed with our knowledge and team strategy... Looking at our competitors, we realized how serious they were,” Ramos said. “They were well equipped, both in mind and hardware and seemed very determined to win.”
Each team was allowed to bring one computer to the competition, and being up against schools like Lower Merion and The Haverford School, among others, the Coatesville team named “Monty Python and the Holy Grails” said they felt like they had brought a dinosaur to compete against race cars.
Both novice and advanced teams shared a common pool of approximately 20 problems. Each problem carried a point value, where values were assigned based on problem difficulty. The objective was to solve as many problems as possible, by submitting a problem to the judges, in two and a half hours. The team with the most points in each division won.
Following the competition, Coatesville’s team continued to think about and discuss the problems and the “edge cases” they hadn’t considered.
When the winners of the coding competition were announced, they called out Coatesville Senior High School in first place in the Novice Division. Bream, Henderson, and Ramos were all surprised to win. Ramos acknowledged the value of working together.
“Our path to victory was not through sheer knowledge, but through team work,” Ramos said. “With assigned roles and an adaptable mind-set we were able to accomplish more with less.”
Coach Sheehan was delighted by their win and by the overall experience.
“It was a pleasure to see their dedication, determination and growth in the knowledge that they were eventually going to compete with and win the 2017 Code Quest,” Sheehan said. “It is a very rewarding job to be the biggest fan of the team that you get to coach. Watching these three individuals work through the team building process that resulted in them becoming such a close group, but even more so seeing them make themselves proud was a very rewarding experience.”
As the team carried their trophy, their championship belt, and their parting gifts across the Lockheed Martin parking lot, they encountered one of the judges. They asked him about the edge cases they’d failed to consider and he explained. Coatesville administrators said that the most impressive part of the experience was that even after winning first place, they were still curious about how to solve the problem and how to improve.