Published on: 27 July 2017


Two teams of Christ Church coders are celebrating unprecedented success following two similar yet different Australian team programming competitions.

The Code Masters competition, hosted annually by The University of Melbourne, is an open coding contest for high school students from across the nation and is held both on-campus and online. Each year, teachers are invited to enter teams of three in either the junior division (Years 7 to 9) or senior division (Years 10 to 12).

This year, 12 Christ Church teams lined up to tackle the two and a half hours of challenging and inspirational problems. Only two teams in Australia obtained the perfect score – and both were from Christ Church. Our Year 10 team, consisting of Ben Davison-Petch, Marcus Handley and Nicholas Patrikeos, claimed first prize by a margin of 10 minutes, while our Year 11 team, made up of Caleb Cheng, Rohan Maloney and Albert Smith, claimed second prize.

Later in the year, we had 14 teams participate in the University of NSW ProgComp which entails a challenging two hours of problem solving. This competition has historically been dominated by elite schools from New South Wales and Victoria, but this year two of our teams finished in the top five. Impressively, these were the two teams who obtained a perfect score in The University of Melbourne Code Masters competition. Our Year 11 team finished third with the Year 10 team finishing fifth.

Teacher in Charge of Informatics, Mr Jan Honnens said “Over the years we have gradually built a culture of enjoyment and excellence towards informatics at Christ Church through lunchtime sessions, informatics coding camps and a year-round involvement in computer programming competitions. Informatics is a challenging, inspirational and real life relevant mix of mathematics and computer science, so we are thrilled for our students to do so well in this pivotal area of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics).

Both Christ Church teams now progress to the ProgComp Grand Final being held in Sydney on Saturday 2 September. Good luck to both teams!