Something I will definitely miss from my time teaching will be the annual coding competitions we went to. They were kind of the ‘playoffs’ for my students, the end of the year show offs, and it was fun to be there with them. The two primary ones we always went to were Hewlett Packard’s CodeWars and Lockheed Martin’s CodeQuest. We always saw CodeQuest as our “elite” one because they allowed fewer teams, so we could only take a limited number of students (plus we got to see F-35s being made). Memories of crazy rental cars, hotel rooms and motel rooms, free food, and a lot of times some kind of end of the year activity (got to see Avengers, go to Medieval Times Dinner Theater, etc).
It was interesting from the very beginning because I had never heard of such a thing before teaching, and they were always quite an experience. For the first few years we only went to HP CodeWars in Austin, which is where it started but is no longer there. Biggest take away from that one, free giveaways and breakfast tacos. After going there for a couple of years we started looking around, and CodeQuest sounded like a nice addition. They have had great speakers, awesome free giveaways, and getting to see what tech Lockheed has coming up. We eventually added some UIL competitions, which we didn’t like near as much (they were in Java and a completely different type of competition), but adding different events was always a nice option.
CodeWars and CodeQuest were always fun, they had food, games, giveaways, and a certain type of atmosphere that was just great for the students (and coaches). Lockheed Martin and HP were always trying to “sell” you their company as well, basically realizing the students were the future of IT and that if they wanted the best they better start recruiting early. We also did PyWeek one year which included making a game meeting certain specifications. I had really planned on adding to that and doing more with it. It was another very different one that we really had only tested out. The whole point of all of them was real world programming, fun, and just getting to use the skills they had learned.
Getting the emails from the competitions over the past couple of weeks was kind of rough. I realized it wasn’t just the students that got something from the events, but I did as well. the students were using what I taught them, enjoying the competition, learning how to use it, meeting other programmers, and guess what? I got all those same things. I used what I taught them, I enjoyed the competition, I learned how to use my skills better every year, and met other coaches and world renowned programmers. I may try to find a way to volunteer, just to have that experience again, and getting the free gear wouldn’t be bad either 🙂