B'luru, Mysuru boys among Google contest winners

Neerav Aiyappa of Mysuru and Aadi Kuchlous of Bengaluru are among nine schoolchildren who were declared winners of Google’s ‘Code to Learn’ competition on Wednesday.

Bengaluru’s Arnav Satish Sindhoor, a class 7 student at the International Public School, also emerged the winner of the computer programme competition, organised by the search engine giant under the Rashtriya Avishkar Abhiyan of the Human Resource Development Ministry.

HRD Minister Smriti Irani felicitated all the nine winners here and launched the next edition of Google’s ‘Code to Learn-2016’ contest.

“The ‘Code to Learn 2015’ contest saw over hundreds of entries from across the country. Students from over 50 cities participated,” the ministry said in a statement.

The jury comprised scientists and computer engineers from Google, ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) India and the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi.

Srikrishna Madhusudhanan of BVM Global School, Chennai, won the contest along with Aiyappa from Excel Public School, Mysuru, and Kuchlous from the Inventure Academy Bengaluru under class 5 and 6 students category. All the three winners are students of class V.

Under class 7 and 8 category, Dev Parikh of Apeejay School, Pitampura, Delhi, and Bitthal Maheshwari of Gagan Public School, Aligarh, UP, were declared winners besides Sindhoor. All of them were students of class 7.

Shyam, a class 9 student at St Michael’s Academy Higher Secondary School, Chennai, Arjun S, a class 9 student at Velammal Vidhyashram, Surapet, Chennai, and Annanay Sachdeva, a class 10 student at Heritage School, Gurgaon, won the contest held for class 9 and 10 students.

“The minister gave a suggestion to Google India team that in the next phase starting next year, it may identify students from government schools as well, for participating in the contest,” the ministry said.

With the launch of the ‘Code to Learn-2016’ contest, parents of students from class 5 to 10 can register on behalf of their wards on a website created for the contest.

“Students can create their projects in Scratch or App Inventor and submit them on the contest site. Project submission will be open from June 20, 2016, and the last date to submit projects is July 31, 2016,” the ministry said.

Schoolchildren can create a wide variety of projects, including games, animation, storytelling and even Android apps, without writing even one line of computer codes by using the Scratch and App Inventor, which are free visual programming languages made available to children online.