Our Year 12 Computer Science student, Alex Gee, recently attended the “Girls Programming Workshop” at the University of Canterbury (UC).

The workshop was a great opportunity for students to mingle with other high school girls with a similar interest. The workshop ran from 10am to 4pm on Saturday 11th June. Women software Engineers from UC were on hand to provide help. This workshop is great prep for the National programming contest later in the year.

Georgia is looking forward to the completion of the Wainuku Hub.

She said it will be “Way nicer, great to be in a dedicated tech learning area”

Another event for our young women was the UC STEMinism Technology evening on Tuesday 28 June 2022. This event was aimed at female students in Year 11-13 interested in finding out more about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) study and career options. Clickhere for more information.

But what about the Boys?

You may be asking “But what about the Boys?”. Shaun Gentleman, Ryan Moore, and Quin Pike gained a respectable 29 points in the Canterbury School Programming Contest. 29 points is a great achievement as these students have not competed in such an event before. In the contest the programmers worked in teams of 3 on a single computer to solve problems. The problems are allocated points to reflect the difficulty of the problem. The programmers have 5 hours to complete as many problems as possible.

What’s next for any of our programming students? The NZ programming contest will be held on 10th September. The NZ contest is like the Canterbury contest but school, Universities, polytechnics, and professional programmers from around the country can participate.

There is also an international competition the ‘International Olympiad in Informatics’ IOI. The NZIOI hold training camps during the summer holidays and interested students should check out the NZIOI website http://www.nzoi.org.nz/ .

I will be putting together our school teams for the NZ programming contest. Contact me on

Vincent.brannigan@staff.hagley.school.nz

If you are keen.