The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools

MS Student places first in Illinois after 2020 American Computer Science League Finals

Rising eighth grader and Middle School Computer Science Club (MSCSC) member Sonakshi Mutreja placed first in the Junior 5 contest, Illinois Division, after competing in the virtual American Computer Science League Finals in May. The national contest consisted of individual programming problems with a three-hour time limit and short problems with a one-hour time limit spanning a range of topics such as recursive functions, Boolean algebra, data structures, and more. Fresh off the win, Mutreja has spent the summer helping to develop Computer Science training materials in Schoology for incoming sixth graders.
 
Students in the MSCSC engage in activities that support Lab’s computer science curriculum goals such as developing computational thinking skills and solving problems in a practical context where invention and resourcefulness are encouraged. These programming challenges encourage creativity, logic, precision, and problem solving. In addition to writing their own programs in Python, MSCSC students are also learning how to analyze code written by someone else to answer the question “What Does This Program Do?” in areas such as branching, loops, arrays, and strings.