St Aloysius College Sixth Former wins Malta’s National Coding Challenge

Enrique Anthony Galea has won the post-secondary category of the Code Sprint Malta coding competition, which is Malta’s National Programming Competition for Computing students. It is organised by the Directorate for Learning & Assessment Programmes within the Ministry for Education and powered by ICE Malta.

We have spoken to Enrique about his experience:

What is the Code Sprint competition about?

Code Sprint is Malta’s annual national coding competition that first took place in 2018. In the first edition, it was only open to secondary school students but now students in post-secondary institutions as well as universities can enter. The competitors are given a problem that they must solve by writing a Java program within a limited amount of time. The developed solutions are then assessed by a set of judges who assign a score based on a rubric that is also provided to the competitors. After the qualifying and final stages, the top 3 students are announced in each category during the Awards Ceremony.

What motivated you to participate?

Technology has always been my passion, ever since I was young. Programming and solving problems also happen to be hobbies of mine that I greatly enjoy doing, so Code Sprint was something that immediately caught my attention and I knew I had to take part in.

What was the most challenging part of the competition?

The limited time provided to solve the problems given was without a doubt the most challenging part of the competition. The narrow time frame meant that we had to come up with efficient algorithms and plan the structure of our work accordingly so that the behaviour and functionality of completed functions would not be affected if we do not finish in time.

And the highlights?

For me, all the things I learnt was the main highlight. Through practice and feedback, I managed to optimise my work and discover new ways to code and solve programs. Functionality that used to take me dozens of lines of code to implement I can now do in just one line. I enjoyed every part of the competition; it was immensely well organised and the speeches given during the Awards Ceremony were very insightful.

A word of advice for fellow students?

My advice for anyone would be to find their passions and pursue them regardless of any obstacle they might face. The first step to becoming the person you aspire to be is by doing just that.

Thank you for sharing your experience and well done once again, Enrique!