- By Jenna Edwards
Pakuranga College Computer Studies teacher Michael McLeod has claimed first place in the teacher division of the global coding competition Coding Quest.
The annual competition attracts schools from South-East Asia, North America, Europe, and the Middle East each year, but for the second year running, Pakuranga College has been the only New Zealand school to compete.
That may have somethign to do with the time the coding challenges are released, being 1am New Zealand time.
McLeod explains: “Schools are ranked firstly by how many challenges they complete, because it’s an achievement to solve some of the challenges at all.
“However, how quickly challenges are solved is also factored into rankings.
“Fortunately, time to complete is only a tiebreaker.
“We obviously don’t encourage students to be up at 1am, but it does make it harder to get a great ranking.”
This year, Pakuranga College finished 15th out of 198 schools, with eight students from the college competing.
There are 10 coding challenges to solve during the quest, with a new one released every 24 hours.
Each subsequent problem is more difficult than the last, requiring greater coding abilities to complete.
“This year we had three students complete all the challenges, William Leader in year 12 and two amazing year 9 students, Liam Yang and Josh Rosser,” McLeod says.
Of his own success McLeod is modest, after placing first in the teacher division, where he competed against 47 other teachers, only nine of whom solved all the challenges.
“I prefer to celebrate all improvement rather than only excellence, so I don’t often go in for competitions.
“But I gave this one a go so I could see what our students could get from it and was surprised to find myself near the top of the leaderboard, making me curious about how long I could stay there.
“By the end, I solved all the challenges over a couple of hours faster than the runner-up.”
