On May 11th, 2019 Computing Kids and Microsoft joined forces for the 5th Annual Washington State Middle School Computer Science Competition. Students competed in the individual competition, team competition, and the original design project competition. I was impressed by a number of student projects and wanted to highlight a couple.
Project: Finance Mania
Developed By: Eesha, Navmi, and Vishnu
During the original design competition I met Eesha, Navmi and Vishnu. They were eager and excited to share their project with me. They had spent months together working on conceptualizing and building their project. I was most struck by how insightful they were and by how they had the foresight to consider creating a game with social impact that helps individuals with financial decision making.
Inspiration:
We created this project to help people like us and some of our peers who don’t always make the right decisions in financial and health matters. After realizing the trouble and time it takes for us to make the decisions, we thought we should create a project that could help us practice the skills of making the right decisions quickly.
Learning:
In Finance Mania, there are two ways to complete a level. One way will increase one variable and decrease the other, but the other winning path will do the opposite. The path which is harder increases the health but you could lose the game easily without enough health. The way to win is to have the difference between the two variables the lowest. This means that the player will have to decide what they need and what they are willing to risk. Do they need to increase their money in their account or their health? Another challenge is that they can’t have a health of 0 or no money in their account or the game will end early. This would affect their decision of when they would get more health and sacrifice money or the other way around making it harder to complete the game. However, playing the game multiple times would help players develop an understanding of which choices to make and improve their decision-making skills in daily life
Outcome:
With this project, we help people decide which decision to make quickly so that they can continue the game. There is a rating at the end which helps players understand how good they are doing and how much they need to improve by. Last of all, using a game to help people use money properly and use it responsibly, is helpful especially for everyone who likes to play games.
Check out their project here!
-Eesha, Navmi, and Vishnu
Project: Scholar: Scraping the Web
Developed By: Andre Ye and Leo Miao
Andre and Leo are growing up to be clever computer scientists! Together they created a functioning google-like search engine using Python and HTML. Andre shared with me that the project was conceptualized after he received feedback from one of his teachers who deducted points from an assignment due to credibility of research sources. I was impressed by Andre’s ability to accept feedback and handle constructive criticism. Andre and his friend Leo decided to tackle this problem and worked together to develop a potential solution. They worked whenever they had extra time including meetings at each others homes and sometimes even on the weekend. Their efforts resulted in their Scholar project which has the potential to help not only help themselves but also others find more credible resources.
Inspiration:
We were inspired to create Scholar after experiencing the struggle of finding large amounts of credible sources for research papers at school. After reading through pages and pages of Google sites to determine their credibility, we thought, ‘Why not automate this long and tedious task?’
Learning:
After doing this project, we developed a huge appreciation for what search engines can do and an understanding of how vast the web is. Our script did about a fiftieth of what Google does on its first page of search results in more than a thousand times the execution time of Google’s search engine.
Outcome:
“In the future, we plan to improve Scholar in many ways. Firstly, we’d like to improve the algorithm for determining the credibility score, most likely by machine learning. We also plan to run Scholar on a publicly available website so users can submit queries, whose results will be emailed to them. This creates a more flexible way to gather results.
– Andre and Leo
Computing For All is a Non-profit organization with a mission to increase and enhance computer science education for students of all ages and from all backgrounds. We hope that all the students had fun competing in this years competition and hope to see many return again next year. The Computing For All Computer Science Competition is held annually in May. For more information check out the Computing For All website here. If you are interested in our afterschool enrichment programs or our summer camp offerings check out our Computing Kids website here.
Written by: Anna Tang, Teacher Supervisor for Computing Kids
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