Last week, we attended the awards ceremony for the Race to the Top Coding Competition in Northampton. Schools from across Northamptonshire took part in the competition, which was run for the first time this year by Northamptonshire County Council, with support from the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists (WCIT, a City of London Livery Company), the University of Northampton and Code Club.

There were two age groups for the competition, the Primary Category for Years 4-6, which was led by Code Club and the Secondary Category for Year 9 students, led by WCIT and the University of Northampton.

The winners of the primary category were Team Sparky from Park Junior School, who made a very impressive platform game using Scratch. You can view their fantastic winning entry below:

We also chatted to Shaun McMahon, the ICT Technician at Park Junior School who played a major role in inspiring the children at his school to take part in the competition.

Shaun told us why he got involved:

“I thought it was something the kids were really going to pick up on – and I was right! The kids really loved being involved in the coding competition, we had full days – 9am to 3:30pm of pure coding- and they absolutely loved it.

They worked in mixed year group teams as well, so years 4-6 all worked together, so it was a big team effort.

Team Sparky, the team that won, worked very well together, and there was a mixture of boys and girls. It was great to also get the girls into coding as well, which I think it very important.

The whole school is now very excited, they all want to be part of the computing crew after we showed the projects to the whole school. It’s really helped us to embed coding into everything that we do.”