CodeDay – High Schoolers with bright futures
CodeDay is a 24 hour, hackathon type event specifically for high school children. It’s an interesting event primarily because of what the children achieve during the short timescale, but also because of the way it works. It is held 3 times a year simultaneously across 50 states in the USA, as well as Mexico and Kenya.
CodeDay is open to students across all skills levels and provides workshops and mentors to support the students as they work on their coding projects. At the start of the day, students present their ideas for a coding project and can either work with others in a group or on their own. LexisNexis® Risk Solutions is a sponsor of this event and we also provide a Big Data challenge workshop.
We hosted the 2019 CodeDay Atlanta event at the LexisNexis Risk Solutions Alpharetta office. Our HPCC Systems Big Data workshop was attended by 450 students across 10 US cities. We were also involved in CodeDay Winter in February, providing another Big Data workshop challenge, which attracted 1098 student participants.
CodeDay June 2020
We had the opportunity to participate in another fantastic CodeDay event in June, which went ahead despite the difficulties presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. Tyler Menezes, Executive Director of CodeDay and his team did a fantastic job of putting together a virtual event for the first time and bringing students together.
The event took a few more days to complete due to it being virtual. Our Big Data Challenge was held on June 3rd, with over 160 students forming about 10 teams.
For this event, a new dataset was provided along with fresh challenges, the outcome was outstanding to us and we received the great news that students are learning more about big data and are becoming interested in this field.
Bahar Fardanian (Tech Evangelist, LexisNexis Risk Solutions) was our representative at this event, providing the workshop and developing the Big Data Challenge. Here is a roundup of the event in her own words:
I personally want to thank Tyler and his team for doing such an outstanding job at organizing a virtual event and bringing students together.
My regards to the HPCC Systems Solutions Lab team for building and supporting our Big Data Challenge, introducing students to Big Data and turning on their curiosity.
We are particularly thankful to CodeDay for helping us to find one of our high school interns this year. Jefferson Mao is a 12th Grade student at Lambert High School, Suwannee, GA. He heard about the HPCC Systems Intern Program having attending CodeDay in November 2019 and February 2020. He is now working on an intern project that contributes to ongoing development focusing on providing a cloud native version of the HPCC Systems Platform. Jeff’s project involves designing a web interface for creating new HPCC Systems cluster on the Google Cloud platform and he will also be exploring Google Cloud Anthos.
Catch up with more information about CodeDay and find out more about HPCC Systems and our 2020 summer intern program.