Carmel High School junior Alexandra Yang is keeping busy these days with problems that most of her peers and even most adults couldn’t grasp: programming challenges. The challenges will be the focus of an event Yang is organizing, the Indigo Informatics Competition, a programming contest that will take place virtually from 4:30 to 7 p.m. April 15.
“This competition is an excellent opportunity for students across Indiana to showcase their tech talent and potential,” Yang said. “Over the course of the evening, participants competing in teams of one or two will solve a series of original programming problems designed and written by local high school and college students. They will be competing to win a part of the $500 prize.”
The contest will be hosted online by HackerRank, allowing computer minds across Indiana to take part. Each participant will be sent the first challenge at the same time to test their skills. Problems will involve working in C, C++, Java and Python.
“Programming is growing increasingly popular to learn,” Yang said. “These kinds of contests provide a fun and challenging way for people to test their skills.”
Yang and the students helping her with the event are from the Carmel chapter of the Computer Science Honor Society. The CHS chapter has more than 75 members.
Yang began coding when she was 10 years old. Soon after, she joined a local FIRST Robotics team and fell in love with computer science.
She was largely self-taught. Starting with the EV3 language and moving on to Python, she progressed to C and C++ from Harvard’s online CS50 course.
