A pupil from Bradford Grammar School (BGS) has won the national final of a competition to find the best computer programmer in the country.
Alex Davies, aged 14 from Bradford, was invited to enter the TCS Oxford Computing Challenge (OCC) alongside 73 other Bradford Grammar School pupils that achieved a top 10% score in the UK Bebras computational thinking challenge. A pilot took place last year and the first official challenge took place in March 2018.
More than 5,300+ students from across the UK participated in the Oxford Computing Challenge, sponsored by Tata Consultancy Services and the University of Oxford. The challenge is an initiative, which helps talented computational thinkers, develop their skills by asking them to solve tasks with programmed solutions.
Alex scored maximum points in the entire Intermediate age category making him the best programmer in the country in his age group; he said, “Entering the challenge was a great opportunity to challenge myself against other children from all over the country. Some of the questions seemed impossible so I was really surprised but very happy when I won”.
BGS’s Head of Computer Science, Christine Harvey said: “This is fantastic news for Alex and well-deserved; to get through to the UK Bebras and TCS OCC finals shows he has an exceptional problem-solving ability and a very bright future. We couldn’t be more proud at BGS.”
Alex was invited to the TCS Innovation Forum to receive his award from TV and Radio presenter Spencer Kelly and K. Ananth Krishnan the Vice-President and Chief Technology officer at TCS. Alex said: “At the presentation day I got the brilliant opportunity to try out mixed reality technologies with the winners of the other 3 categories and the keynote speech by mathematician Dr. Hannah Fry showing how data analysis can analyse human behaviour was great”.
This is just one of the initiatives that Bradford Grammar School is involved in to attempt to address the current skills gap in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) careers.
“This is fantastic news for Alex and well-deserved; to get through to the UK Bebras and TCS OCC finals shows he has an exceptional problem-solving ability and a very bright future.
We couldn’t be more proud at BGS.”
Be Social!