~Tier 2 & 3 town students lead the India chapter~
Hyderabad: ICode, one of the world’s leading Coding Competition and assessment organizations, launched its India leg of ICode Global Hackathon in January 2021. Following the global trends of amazing response and participation from parents and schools, across 22 countries in the past 3 years of the event, ICode received more than 40,000 participants in its preliminary selection rounds for India. These students participated in a multi-level competition starting with State level initial selection in August 2021 and progressing to Zonal, National, and then South Asia events in November 2021. Global participation number for the hackathon brings more that 2 million students.
In the course of the competition, a total of 57 students from India have excelled their way into the Global finals of ICode Global Hackathon. The final competition was held on the 12th of December 2021. The shortlisted Indian students competed against finalists from other countries like USA, Israel, China, Singapore, UAE, and others. 10 Indian students made it to top 50 positions in the Global Final
Each level of the Hackathon is designed as a 60 minute, adaptive and gamified coding competition mapped to age-appropriate competencies starting with ages 6 to 16 years. The modules include beginner and advanced levels of Block Coding for primary grade students and beginner and advance levels of Python for middle and high school students.
One of the most remarkable insights from the India leg of the Hackathon is that children from tier 2 and tier 3 cities performed exceptionally well and make up for over 75% of the finalists from the country. The Bolton school, Secunderabad, Telangana is one of the finalist schools from India. Its Principal, Mrs. D.Janaki said, “The vision of the ICODE Hackathon team to make the students realize their own potential will surely bring out the latent talents in the students across the country. I am extremely proud of my students who have done exceedingly well in the competition. Congratulations are also due to their parents and teachers who guided the students so well”
Mr Asaf Rothchild , the Head of Global Partnerships, ICode Foundation said, “The result from India is not at all surprising for us at ICode. Children from India are probably the smartest of the lot globally. The number of finalists from India stands to grow exponentially in the coming years as the country rolls out the New Education Policy. We would like to congratulate the leaders and policy makers in India for their focus on building foundation skills in Computational Thinking in their education policy. ”
