The prestigious Oakridge Codefest, Bengaluru’s largest 24-hour high-school hackathon, was held on January 21st and 22nd at Oakridge International School, Bengaluru. The 6th edition of the coding hackathon saw the participation of 127 tech enthusiasts in 38 teams from 13 schools coming from various parts of India. The Guest of Honour Anmol Bagbai, Senior Director at Innominds, emphasised the importance of digital ethics and choosing the right path to success. “I am sure all the participants are innovators. How we solve real-world problems defines our success in life”, he added. The Chief Guest of the event, Oakridge School Principal Ms Pallavi Mishra congratulated the participants for pushing their limits at the all-night coding hackathon. “Codefest is a unique platform for young coders to create and innovate. It’s amazing to see how children think far ahead of their time”, she added.

Codefest provided the opportunity for aspiring developers to create projects and connect with mentors and industry leaders and pitch for funding to make their ideas a reality. Students had 24 hours at their disposal, during which they had to develop innovative solutions on the themes such as Transport and Infrastructure, Education, Environmental Sustainability, Healthcare, and Game Development. They worked in small teams to develop avant-garde applications.

Team Solar from The International School Bangalore bagged the first prize in the Junior Category. On the themes of Healthcare and Environmental Sustainability, the winners developed an AI Recipe Generator that creates nutritious and scrumptious recipes for people with their leftover ingredients. “All you have to do is take one picture of the ingredients and voila, 3 beautiful recipes catered to your situation”, said Dhyan, happily describing his project.

On the theme of Education, Team Slidemen from National Public School Bengaluru won the first prize in Senior Category. They worked on an AI-powered platform that creates presentations faster than Google Slides. “We used React and Next.js for the front-end, and Python with FastAPI and SQL for the back-end”, explained Nand and Neel during the presentation.

“This is my second year in Codefest, and I am so happy to present my MedTrack App at Codefest”, said Anika, the “Tech Girl”. Cash prizes worth 1 lakh were distributed to the title winners. The core organising team of Codefest consisting of students and teachers received appreciation from all sides for circumventing the obstacles and meticulously planning the event.

Oakridge Codefest was an epiphany for many schools in integrating Coding Lessons into the curriculum which is essential in building future-ready programmers. Oakridge International School has a Design Lab that allows learners to create innovative, sustainable, human-centred solutions for the problems they identify. Students are encouraged to inquire and investigate through technology. As an IB continuum premium school, Oakridge ensures that students scale up to meet emerging industrial demands. A three-week rigorous boot camp with more than 100 students was also organised as a prelude to Codefest.

The boot camp was a student-led initiative to edify aspiring coders more about computers, and coding and better prepare them for Codefest. The trainers in the bootcamp were all Oakridge students from grades MYP 5 to DP 2 who are proficient in computer science and coding. 115 students across MYP were trained to participate in the Oakridge Codefest and students named Aditya, Raviish and Sachit served as trainers. There were 6-8 sessions covering the fundamentals of computer programming, OOPS, and debugging.