On May 15, 2021, we hosted the highly anticipated Final Competition and Award Ceremony of our International Coding Elite (ICE) Challenge 2021 at HKPC – Hong Kong Productivity Council. This year, we had over 3,000 primary and secondary students from 150 schools around Hong Kong and Macau showcasing their coding abilities in the competition. Over 2 months, participating students built fundamental coding knowledge, deployed code on the CodeCombat arenas and wrote over 300,000 lines of code!
Mr Dylan Kwan, Co-Founder and CEO of Caprikon Education, kicked off the event with opening remarks and an introduction of the competition arena.
Two-way live stream was arranged at the Hong Kong Productivity Council and Macau Pui Ching Middle School.
Students were given two and a half hours of independent coding time to work out the best strategy in the Sky Span arena. They had to study the methods and properties of different heroes, develop and experiment with their code, and simulate it against other contestants to compete for the highest rank in the preliminary round. Students ranked top 8 from each of the divisions then proceeded to the knockout round.
To make the knockout round more exciting, the top 4 finalists from each division were invited to draw their opponents by themselves! Participants watched with excitement as each match was simulated and screened live – one match at a time. The winners continued to advance to the next rounds until 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place for both the primary and secondary divisions were identified.
After an hour of intense simulation, here are the winners of ICE Challenge 2021! Congratulations!
Primary School Division | Secondary School Division | |
Champion | Cheng Ching Kiu Kingsley (Diocesan Boys’ School Primary Division & Hour of Code) | Cheung Chun Lok (La Salle College & Hour of Code) |
1st runner-up | Chan Hasan Hin Wing (St. Francis of Assisi’s English Primary School & ICanCode) | Kuan Su Meng (Macau Pui Ching Middle School & Macau Science and Technology Innovation Education Association) |
2nd runner-up | Kan Cayden (Kiangsu-Chekiang College (International Section) & ICanCode) | Lao Chit Bryan (Macau Pui Ching Middle School & Macau Science and Technology Innovation Education Association) |
The support and guidance of teachers were integral to the participating students and created a deeply memorable learning experience. To express our appreciation, 6 teachers were awarded the teaching excellence awards in recognition of their time and effort dedicated to the competition. The award recipients were:
Primary School Division | Secondary School Division |
Mui Ka Kit (G.T. (Ellen Yeung) College) | Ho Hau Lai (Baptist Lui Ming Choi Secondary School) |
Jerome Tam (HKCCCU Logos Academy) | Wong Kwan Yi Sherry (Mu Kuang English School) |
Thomas Hine (Kowloon Junior School) | Kwok Sheung Yin Dominic (St. Louis School) |
“Joining the ICE Challenge is a valuable learning experience for students to embrace failures and improve upon their mistakes.” Prof Kam-Tim Woo, Associate Director of The Academy for Bright Future Young Engineers of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology highlighted.
“Gaming is a good starting point for learning coding. Once students have acquired the fundamental coding knowledge and built up their logical thinking skills in the game, they will be able to generate solutions for many other problems they encounter in life” said Dr Ray Cheung, Associate Professor of Department of Electrical Engineering, CityU; Founder of Hour of Code Hong Kong; Chairman of Hong Kong STEM Education Alliance.
50 of the ICE Challenge finalists will be nominated to the CodeCombat Global Final Competition in the coming August, where they will get a chance to compete on the international stage. We are so proud of everyone’s achievements and can’t wait for the continuation of these knock-outs in the next ICE Challenge, see you there!
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