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Smith and Skyla Birch from St Mary’s College recently won the Queensland
Premiers Coding Challenge. They competed in the Year 7-8 Python/JavaScript/
HTML Pairs Category. The Premier’s Coding Challenge is an annual state-wide
initiative open to all Queensland students in Year 3 to Year 10, to encourage
and foster a love of technology, coding and development. The Virtual
presentation was live streamed across the state and was broadcast at the
College assembly.
St Mary’s College always encourages interested students to
participate in the competition with the 2020 challenge set to code an
interactive and innovative digital solution to raise awareness of
cybersecurity. From explaining the importance of cybersecurity, to planning a
digital solution for a specific audience, writing an algorithm, turning the
algorithm into visual block code using Scratch or text-based code using HTML or
Python, all the way through to supporting a self-evaluation of the prototype
and filming a video explanation of their design. Ava, Skyla and other students
were encouraged to enter as part of the College Makerspace (The CITADEL). “We
would like to thank Ms Patterson and Mrs T for helping in the setup, the
recommendations and coding advice” To enter the challenge, the students began
by learning a new language. Ava explained “We really wanted to challenge
ourselves but we first had to learn HTML code” Skyla said “I think the hardest
thing was, we had all these ideas, but we really had to limit them down and
find a general idea what we wanted. “Then we were able to adopt things and take
things away to streamline it.” The girls created their entry - a website, using
HTML code, they then utilised the College CITADEL equipment to transfer the
website onto a Raspberry Pi device which they set up as a web server. Ava said
“We got our friends and other students in the library to test it and tell us
what they thought, we could kind of tell if they found it exciting, and we
found what we had to do after that.” Ava and Skyla have a real passion for STEM
which they share with their peers.
As a duo, the girls have become regular
winners of technology based awards, in January 2020, the won the Young STEM
Award at the Fraser Coast Australia Day Awards. In 2019, the girls won the Mayor’s
Telstra Innovation Awards and won a trip to Sydney. From that they were invited
to apply to be SheEO Activators as part of a Queensland Government Initiative
that sponsored 10 women to be Activators. Ava and Skyla reviewed businesses
asking for funding from SheEO in 2020 and voted on which women-led venture
should receive the money. These sessions were held online and continued through
COVID19 lock down.
