Indian Students Among The Top 10 In The Finals Of ICode Global Hackathon

ICode, one of the world’s leading Coding Competition and assessment organizations, launched its India leg of ICode Global Hackathon in January 2021.

New Delhi: 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 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. At the recently concluded final competition, the shortlisted Indian students competed against finalists from other countries like USA, Israel, China, Singapore, UAE, and others.

The 10 Indian students who made it to top 50 positions in the Global Final are

• Lehar Garg, Siddhjeet Singh Yadav, Ramit Garg, Pratap Singh Rudra and Mishika Shah from Little Angels High School, Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh
• Yatharth Shah and Danish Reddy Mandlem from Bolton School, Secunderabad, Telangana
• Manya Agrawal from Krishna Public School, Raipur, Chhattisgarh
• S Saisritarun from BIPS Bagalkot, Bengaluru, Karnataka
• Viraj Singh from Aryan International School, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh

Each level of the Hackathon was 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 per cent of the finalists from the country.

Speaking about the outcome of the hackathon, Asaf Rothchild , 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.”

Adding further Amit Yadav, Head of India Partnerships, ICode Foundation said, ‘”There is a lot of potential in the country and when it comes to an IT workforce, India is indispensable. Through this Olympiad our vision is to harness this talent and bring our students at par with their international counterparts.”