The event expanded internationally this year also! We had teams competing in California and even Taiwan!! How cool is that?!? The Taiwan team said the event was VERY successful and are wanting 4 times more teams next year as they had this year! It's so cool to be a part of something at it's early stages and see it grow! (Even though they've been doing this even for 16 years, I've helped for 7 of those years!) CodeWars was even featured in the paper this past weekend and showed up on the HP homepage today!
We prepare months in advance, and stay late the Friday afternoon before the event to make sure set up and everything is complete. This year we weren't here too late on Friday night, fortunately! I was done and home around 7p.m. Yeah, we are that awesome!
This is one of my favorite posters I hung thing year. I hung over 100 of these by myself starting a week before the contest. We print a bunch of posters with pictures of the kids that attended the year previously, so when returning kids arrive on the day of the competition they might see posters of themselves. There is not a single Code Wars poster left in the building by the end of Saturday afternoon. All of the students peel them off the walls and take them home. They even take the restroom signs home! NO JOKE.
Then volunteers arrive at 7a.m. the next morning to do registration, hand out breakfast, show kids to their tables, etc. So much to do! The schools start arriving at 7:30a.m. even though the event doesn't start until 9a.m. They use that 1 1/2 hours to set up their computers and equipment, eat breakfast and anything else they need to do before the coding contest begins!
This was just one side of students. There were three sides full of students!
Around noon volunteers serve pizza then immediately following lunch there is a raffle. SO many sweet prizes this year!
Before the raffle this year they did something a little different. They gathered all the kids to some side of the campus and had them do the Harlem Shuffle. haha...or at least tried. It's hard to get so many kids to all participate. Here is one video and here is another.
Here were the raffle prizes for this year!
They had a bunch of HP Envy x2 laptops, Spectre laptops, All-in-Ones desktops, Beats headphones, monitors, speakers, etc. Then before each of the kids leave, they get a backpack with some HP promotional items inside.
It was a great event this year! The week after the competition I type up a two page report of all of the surveys the teachers and students turn in at the end of the competition.They had nothing but good things to say about everything. It's so fun to be apart of something so successful every year!!
Some of the kids don't take the surveys very seriously and their personality/humor spills out all over their surveys. Here was my favorite survey from this year:
Little did he know that I would be the one reading all the surveys! hahahaha
Go here to see more information on CodeWars.
Thanks for following!
~Nat
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