Elsies River teams excel in libraries coding competition

Wendy Dondolo|Published 7 months ago

The Elsies River Tribal Chiefs, from left to right: Zhubeir Morris, Steven Chipofya, Omar Mohamed, and Kelvin Chipofya. Picture: supplied

Elsies River library teams have achieved remarkable success in a city-wide coding competition held on Mandela Day. The event saw twenty-seven City libraries hosting in-house coding sessions, and the results are in: two teams from Elsies River library have secured positions in the top three.

These teams will now compete with other top-performing libraries to advance to the national competition in October and the World Tournament in December.

Team Yoh! from Elsies River, with members Manuel Saca, Carlos Saca, Angelo Saca, Caylim Overmeyer, and Kaygan Overmeyer. Picture: supplied

A total of 438 participants, forming over 30 teams, competed at 28 libraries across the City. By the end of the day, the Elsies River Tribal Chiefs emerged as the top-performing team. The Belhar Rangers claimed second place, while Team Yoh!, also from Elsies River, secured third place.

The competition focused on unplugged coding, which requires minimal data. Teams used the TANKS or RANGERS app, which is only 7MB in size and can be played offline using tokens from game packs.

The Mandela Day Coding Tournament is supported nationally by Tangible Africa and the Leva Foundation. Councillor Patricia Van der Ross, the Mayoral Committee Member for Community Services and Health, expressed her enthusiasm for the initiative.

“Our libraries have really taken the proverbial bull by the horns with this coding initiative. I am so happy to see how it is taking hold and hope that we can build on its growing popularity by getting even more of our libraries and our communities involved in the future. Congratulations to everyone who participated this time around, and good luck to those teams who will move on to the rounds still to come,” Van der Ross said.

According to the event organisers, the top three teams from each geographical area in the Mandela Day competition will move on to the next round. A total of twelve teams will compete to determine the top three teams from the City who will represent Cape Town in the national and World Tournament competitions.

Last year’s final tournament saw participants from countries including Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ireland, Germany, and the United States of America. Impressively, the three participating City libraries placed in the top 10.

IOL