Winners of the First Nova Scotia Scratch Programming Competition Announced

NOTE: A list of winners follows this release.

Students from six schools are the winners of the first Scratch programming competition in the province.

Scratch is a free computer programming language developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to help introduce students to coding.

For the first time, Nova Scotia students in grades 4 to 8 were invited to participate in a competition that encouraged students to create a Scratch coding project, such as an interactive story, game or animation, and submit their creation for review.

"It was cool to learn all the amazing things I could do with so many simple programming blocks," said second-place winner Macquire Burke, a Grade 5 student at Duc d'Anville Elementary School in Halifax. "You can build really cool games using really simple commands."

Sixty projects were submitted by students.

"Congratulations to everyone who submitted projects and to the winners on a job well done," said Education and Early Childhood Development Minister Karen Casey. "Coding is behind most electronic devices we use, making it very important that students get to experience it for themselves to help prepare them for opportunities in post-secondary and the technology sector."

These are the winning students:

Grades 4-5

• 1st Place, Nolan Bartlett, Grade 5, Coxheath Elementary School, Cape Breton Regional Municipality
• 2nd Place, Macquire Burke, Grade 5, Duc d'Anville Elementary School, Halifax
• 3rd Place, Bryden Landry, Grade 5, East Richmond Education Centre, St. Peter's, Richmond Co.

Grades 6-8:

• 1st Place, Liam Martell, Grade 8, Bridgewater Junior Senior High School
• 2nd Place, Isaac Craig Poirier, Grade 6, Inverness Education Centre-Academy
• 3rd Place, Peter Rose, Grade 8, Tamarac Education Centre, Port Hawkesbury