On April 22, 2023, students across the USA gathered online to compete in Lockheed Martin’s annual CodeQuest. Lockheed Martin is an American corporation and one of the largest companies in the aerospace, military support, security, and technologies industry. The corporation delivers “innovative solutions to the world’s toughest challenges.” This concept is highly reflected in CodeQuest, an annual computer programming contest for high schoolers. CodeQuest takes a similar approach in presenting real-world problems and encouraging students to develop creative solutions to them. Topics span various fields, such as cryptography, data management, machine learning, and more.

The contest comprises twenty-five problems that are assigned points based on their difficulty, which increases. They are to be solved within a two and a half hour time-limit. Students submit their solutions to an online judge, which automatically runs the code on test cases and returns a score. However, if a solution doesn’t pass, students can’t see where it failed—only a sample test case is available. Thus, figuring out the problems requires careful thinking and multiple tries, testing perseverance and technical skill. Furthermore, good team synergy is a critical component of success. Teammates strategize to maximize their efficiency and score, all while collaborating with each other.

iUniversity Prep students embarked on this quest of challenges. Our computer science teacher, Mr. Daniel Wennersten, led three teams of students to participate in CodeQuest. For the duration of the contest, we pondered over intriguing problems and coded their solutions under the time constraint. It was challenging yet rewarding as we put our coding skills to the test and experienced the joy of problem-solving. To our great delight, one of our teams, the Pow(Poof) Girls, placed third. The team consisted of Grace Sng, Tanvi Popuri, and Tamnhi Huynh. The Pow(Poof) Girls indeed completed the CodeQuest!