Students from Moreno Valley Unified School District earned multiple awards at the first Riverside County Programming Competition held at Valley View High School on April 6, 2019. The competition featured 90 middle and high school participants from nine Riverside County school districts. The winners were crowned after three hours of debugging coding problems. Palm Middle School swept all 3 places in the Middle School Team competition. In addition, a TownGate Elementary School student placed in the middle school individual competition.
For the last month and a half, competitors worked on problems from Cal Poly Pomona and UC Riverside as practice for the contest. The students used HackerRank, a technology hiring platform that is the standard for assessing developer skills, to work through the questions. Students were able to gain experience using the software platform used in the interview process.
“Moreno Valley Unified is a leader in coding in Riverside County,” said Board Vice President Cleveland Johnson, “We are so thrilled to see so many of our students earn awards at the county competition.”
The winners were:
High School Team: 3rd place - Moti Urga and Kadin Hickey from Valley View High School.
Middle School Individual: 1st place - Emiliano Melendrez from Palm Middle School and 2nd place - Aubrey Glancy from TownGate Elementary School.
Middle School Team: 1st place - Mario Avery Castelo, Enzo Angelo Cayetano, Malinda Jin and Maddison Chau from Palm Middle School. 2nd place - Natalie Chun, Carlos Marquez and Janeth Gomez from Palm Middle School. 3rd place - Miguel Medina and Christopher Vallejos from Palm Middle School.