Coding is the name of the game Saturday as the computer science club hosts a schoolwide competition where students will have the chance to showcase their skills.

“The computer science club is hosting it, it’s just the school contest,” junior, computer science club president, Vivan Shah said. “It’s basically just a computer science competition where you bring your own device and you go online on this website called HackerRank and you basically just are given problems and you code solutions to them.”

Students have been reviewing previous material to refine their skills leading up to the competition.

“We’ve been looking at past problems from UIL academics a couple weeks ago,” junior Kapil Ramapalli said. “A lot of people that are competing also went to that competition so I guess that was the main form of preparation.”

With the goal of expanding the club and increasing participation, everyone is invited to participate, no matter how much experience they have.

“Anyone who can code can participate and we have different divisions so it doesn’t matter what your knowledge level is, you can still find problems that you can solve,” Shah said. “Our goal is just to have more members come to the computer science club because after this competition we would like to do other activities and through this competition we’re getting more members and if this goes well then we might try organizing more competitions there’s only two throughout the year that really matter and they’re both hosted by UTD so if this goes well then we can turn it into like a district thing that more people can participate in.”

For Ramapalli, participating in a competitive atmosphere enhances his learning experience and helps enrich his knowledge of computer science.

“I think doing anything in some sort of timed format where you’re competing with other people is going to make you better at that specific task,” he said. “Just programming fast isn’t helpful but being able to problem solve and read code on the fly is definitely important.”

Beyond this competition, Saturday’s contest also provides a chance to practice for higher level competitions and gives students a day to bond with friends.

“It benefits students because they get to practice their computer science, knowledge and skills before the UTD contests that are like right after this so if you want to go for that, then you can basically use this to prepare for those contests,” Shah said. “And it’s just like a good fun day to hone your computer science skills and hang out with your friends.”