The Union of Information Technology Enterprises (UITE) and the „Chronimet” Charitable Foundation have initiated the DigiCode Applied Programming Youth Contest. The final stage of the Contest was held on June 27 in American University of Armenia.
The main goal of the DigiCode is to encourage the schoolchildren to cave their interest in encoding, to develop algorithmic thinking and creativity and discover talented teenagers and girls.
Within the framework of the DigiCode contest, the participants work by using the Scratch (Aghves) and K-Turtle (Kria) programming languages and upload their games in Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) website. Scratch is a graphical programming environment developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and K-Turtle (Kria) is the Armenian-customized version of the Scratch with upgraded modules that are also used to design robots.
The participants aged 8-16 astounded by their work not only the organizers, but also the jury, who faced a difficult challenge when choosing the best. The members of the jury were IT sector representatives.
It should be mentioned that even the youth programming contest was held for the first time, it nevertheless raised an unprecedented interest among schoolchildren. More than 200 young people from all the Marzes of Armenia have applied for the contest. The initial stage has been overcome by 45 participants (just one participant from Yerevan) who then received an encouraging prizes.
The winners of the final stage held received other valuable prizes and rewards, in particular money rewards, equipment, robot details, opportunity to participate at innovation camp, training and internship in IT companies, etc.