Rogers Middle School students win first place in national Youth Coding League – St. Louis Call Newspapers

Rogers Middle School seventh graders Liam Clancy and Landon Sandifer recently won first place in the Youth Coding League postseason as Community Favorite for their newly created game “Inkworld.”

To win the Community Favorite category, Clancy and Sandifer had to go through three rounds of postseason voting and beat over 60 teams from 28 other schools nationwide.

“It was based off of votes, so whoever got the most votes got first place. We just worked on the game and then people could see the updated version of the game on the YCL site, and then they could vote there, too,” Clancy said.

The YCL offers two sessions – or seasons – each year: one in the spring and one in the fall. Each season includes a regular season and a postseason, with students meeting weekly for practice throughout the semester. The regular season is nine weeks long and structured so students learn something new each week.

“They have weekly challenges, they’re called sprints, and that teaches them how to code through Google’s CS First program,” Alison Nixon, the Rogers Middle School Youth Coding League coach, said. “So it teaches them different skills each week, they build upon those skills, and then the last four weeks of the competition, they get together in groups and they create a game based on the theme.”

This session’s theme was art, inspiring Clancy and Sandifer – known as the Tiny Boys – to create their game “Inkworld.”

“The prompt was to use our skills that we have learned to revolutionize art and computer science. We have done this in this game by allowing people to draw new ground for them to use for easier transportation. There is currently a problem in the world of good transportation being expensive and unaffordable. Our solution to this problem is to allow any ordinary person to create a temporary platform of any shape, to allow them to move wherever they please,” the two explained.

In total, the Tiny Boys worked about 20 hours over the course of four weeks to create their 11-level game. Clancy focused on the “technical stuff,” while Sandifer primarily focused on the art aspect, though he also contributed to the technical side.

“Liam had the idea of making a game where you can move a little guy around to the end, like a platformer game. But instead of just jumping, you have to draw your own platforms since the theme is art. After that, we kind of started to think of cooler levels that would take longer to finish and be more complex,” Sandifer said. “There was a lot of stuff at the start that was hard, but after like the third week, it was kind of just a matter of thinking about what to add.”

“We have three achievements: beating the game once, beating the game without drawing –  which is almost impossible, it’s really hard – and then getting to this special secret place that we added,” Clancy added.

Apart from the Community Favorite award won by the Tiny Boys, YCL also gives postseason awards for “Technical Merit” and “Most Improved.” In the regular season, awards are given to the top 10 individual coders and the top coder team, all of whom earn points from sprint scores. Prizes vary depending on the award received and the age group in which they compete in, but in the Tiny Boys’ case, they were awarded $850.