North Penn Senior High School’s Java Coding Club competed in a prestigious coding competition called Codequest, hosted by Lockheed Martin at its King of Prussia Headquarters this year. The crew prepped all year, doing practice problems on the Code Quest official practice website, revising, and collaborating on tedious tasks to potentially get an Internship offer at Lockheed Martin.  

“We did pretty well. We got second place in the advanced division out of quite a few teams and, honestly, did better than we expected,” advanced division member Ethan Fox stated.

They had three teams competing: two advanced and one novice. The novice team did well despite being newcomers to the competition. Ethan Fox, a junior, held his own compared to his senior teammates and made a name for himself. 

“I think I did pretty well. My teammates Srihari Chakravarthi and Hassan Soliman did much better than I did, but that was expected. They took me under their wing and helped me do much better than I thought possible,” Fox stated 

The growing concern is that most competitors were seniors, leaving a massive void that needs to be filled for repeated success next year. The year prior, the team did not do as well as they had hoped, so this year’s success was very important to their overall motivation and desire to keep leading and preparing for the competition next year. However, with the central issue of a lack of underclassmen, these juniors will have a tough job recruiting and staying on schedule if they want to score better.

“I think we still have an okay amount of juniors, It’s just this year; we were more split across the two different divisions. My good friend Amogh Kollipara was on the other advanced division team. Next year, we can try to do better at recruiting, as we know this school has a massive talent pool, and we could see some people move up from the novice to the advanced division, “ Fox explained. 

If they participated, the members also had the chance to fill out an application form for a summer high school internship at Lockheed Martin. Their scores from the competition, portfolio, letters of recommendation, awards, and extracurriculars would round out the process for getting that offer. 

Sources
Lockheed Martin