Vandyke excel in Code Quest Competition

Last month, six Vandyke students spent a Saturday morning competing in the Lockheed Martin Code Quest Competition.  Each year, Lockheed Martin hosts this special computer programming competition where teams of two to three students work together to solve problems using Java, Python, C#, and/or C++ programming to complete the ‘quest’.

Vandyke entered two teams in the competition. Team A was Tommy A, Charlie W and Elsa W, and Team B consisted of Gabriel G, Kath P and Kieran R-J.

Students arrived at the Ampthill site early in the morning, ready to get started. Once we had been escorted to the competition building, students settled to their allocated PC’s and attempted the trial tasks. For one of the teams, this was particularly challenging as their PC was not working correctly. The problem was eventually fixed and they completed the trial tests with only seconds to spare before the real competition started.

Following the trial tests, students took part in 90 minutes of problem solving and writing code solutions; the task consisted of more than 20 challenging problems created by Lockheed Martin engineers and computer programmers.

Our students did brilliantly and, after a nervous wait, the results were announced. We were delighted that Team A came 1st and Team B came 4th. Huge congratulations to everyone who took part – what a fantastic achievement!