Cracking the coding challenge

There’s just over six weeks to go till the NCSS Challenge starts, with coders from absolute newbies through to seasoned programmers ready to compete.

An initiative of the Australian Computing Academy and the University of Sydney in partnership with Grok Learning, the NCSS Challenge is a programming competition open to all school students and teachers.

Learning to code is not only a great skill to have for future employment, but also develops problem-solving capability in students. The challenge teaches students to code in Python 3.6, an easy-to-learn scripting language used across many disciplines from web applications to scientific research. Companies like Google, Facebook and Reddit all use Python in their infrastructure and web services.

The challenge runs for five weeks from Monday, 27 July and teaches programming on the go, meaning even students without coding skills can take part. Featuring four different streams — Newbies, Beginniners, Intermediate and Advanced — content is aligned to the Australian Digital Technologies Years 5–10 Curriculum and focuses on solving exciting real-world problems.

Students compete with upper primary and high school students across Australia and New Zealand, earning points for the chance to climb the leaderboard.

Teachers are provided with notes and support needed to run the challenge as a classroom activity, without the need for any software installation. Access to content is available all year, allowing teachers to move at a pace that suits the class and allows progress tracking. The NCSS Challenge works under a subsciption model and you can find more information here. 

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/metamorworks