On Monday 16 January 53 students from the Senior School took part in the Oxford University Computing Challenge. 

This online competition is by invitation only and is offered to those students who achieved scores in the top 10% in the country when they took the Bebras Challenge in November. It is a fantastic opportunity for any student so to have over 50 invited from the 300 students who took part in the Bebras Challenge is amazing.

Our students found out about their invitation to take part just before we broke up in December so spent time over the Christmas holidays revising and preparing for the challenge.

The challenges were hard, as you would expect given that only the top 10% in the country were invited to take part, but all the girls who took part worked hard and did their absolute best. Robert Bradley, Head of Computer Science at the Senior School, said “I’m so proud of every one of the students who took part. Their willingness to attempt what was an extremely hard challenge and their resilience was amazing to see. What is more, many of them are already asking and emailing me on how they can practise in order to improve for next year.”

The results should be back in a week or so, and we wish all the girls the best of luck.

The Oxford University Computing Challenge aims to develop their skills further from the Bebras Challenge and produce programmed solutions to computational thinking problems. The syllabus for the challenge is listed below;

Syllabus Area One:

• Strings, Output and Input
• Mathematical and Logical Operators
• Conditionals
• Loops
• Functions
• Lists and Arrays
• File Input/Output*
• Classes and Objects*

Syllabus Area Two:

• Logical Thinking
• Algorithmic Thinking
• Decomposition
• Pattern Identification
• Abstraction
• Evaluation
• De-bugging