Richmond high school students raided the provincial Game of Apps (GoA) championships recently.
Team DogeCode from Richmond Secondary (Arthur Guo, Chloe Shen, Hana Domingo, Harry Peng, Jimmy Wang and William Kang) was provincial champions.
While Team Hello World from McMath Secondary (Jason Liang, Kaitlyn Gee, Oscar Yang, Sarah Ly, Sophie Price) placed second in the province.
In the Division 2 competition, the Best Developed App award went to Team Bean Sprouts, of Steveston-London Secondary (Andrew Han, Arthur Jin, Irene Xie and Madeline Li).
And the People’s Choice Award went to Team Carry, of Burnett Secondary (Eric Hou, Jared Barbosa, Megan Wu, Melanie Cheung and Michelle Xu).
There were also individual awards (as selected by the GoA mentors):
Outstanding leader: Megan Wu (Burnett);
Outstanding designer: Sophie Price (McMath) and
Outstanding developer: William Kang (Richmond).
The B.C. title for the Richmond Secondary team was all the more sweet after it narrowly lost the provincial title last year to New Westminster Secondary.
Game of Apps is a program that guides high school students through the whole process of building apps from beginning to end.
Local professional designers and developers mentor the students weekly and teach them how to use the same tools, techniques and processes employed in the industry while the students learn to build mobile apps.
Richmond School District’s Roland Tecson, who looks after the local teams, said they are launching a new Middle Years program in September, an introductory coding program for students in Grades 6 through 9.
“It will employ Apple’s Swift Playgrounds curriculum (approved by the BC Ministry of Education),” said Tecson in an email.
“Students will have the opportunity to submit their final projects and may get invited to attend Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in Silicon Valley.”
