Winning Lockheed Martin's Codequest Competition!
On Saturday, my team and I competed in Lockheed Martin’s CodeQuest Competition: A 2.5 hours competition to solve as many programming challenges as possible.
It was our first time taking part, but we had been practising together beforehand and were excited to see how we would perform under pressure. After hearing from the Lockheed Martin team and learning about their work and early-career opportunities, the countdown began and we started coding.
Each challenge turned a real-world scenario into a programming problem, which made solving them feel meaningful and exciting. We divided the problems between us systematically as practices and soon built up our points.
Then came the final two minutes.
One of my teammates was extremely close to completing another solution, but was stuck on the specific rounding method that was needed. On spotting this I put down the problem I was currently working on, and quickly implemented the rounding method needed - I had fortunately learnt what to do when I had come across it in a practice problem previously.
Afterwards, we had lunch and met students from other schools while waiting for the results. It was great hearing about their interests, ambitions and the different problems they had attempted. Then the placements were announced - and to our delight our team won first place!
Winning was an incredible, but that moment in which we submitted the final problem just in time made the whole day worth it in itself. I'm really looking forward to competing in more exciting events like these in the future!
Thank you to Lockheed Martin and the CodeQuest team for such a memorable day!
