Teen Creates Global Online Coding Competition for High Schoolers
When he got to high school, Ethan Eirinberg was excited to learn more about programming. But when he enrolled, Ethan discovered his school in the suburbs of Chicago didn’t offer coding classes until students were juniors.
Instead of waiting two years, Ethan took matters into his own hands and started a computing club at his school. “I was thinking of ways to motivate the club,” he told ReadWrite. “So I had an idea to create a competition for high school students around the world, like me, who want to create something but don’t have a place to do it.”
Now sixteen-year-old Ethan is the founder of CreateHS, a global online coding competition for high schoolers. Students are given a new challenge every month and are judged on creativity, challenge requirements, and design.
October’s challenge—the inaugural competition—is to teach other people the fundamentals of web development or any basic programming language by creating a website. This first round of judges are professionals from Teens in Tech, Codecademy, Code.org, and Team Treehouse, all of which provide resources for young people to learn about coding.
Learn-to-code startup Team Treehouse also sponsors CreateHS, providing participants with accounts and prizes for the winners. Ethan’s older brother won a site-building contest the company put on last year. So when Ethan came up with the idea for his competition, he reached out to Team Treehouse CEO Ryan Carson first. Carson’s company announced earlier this year that its big, new focus would be working with high school students in programs that would prepare them to get technology jobs right after graduation.
"We're really excited about CreateHS and we're glad to be able to support what they're doing,” said Carson, who is one of the judges for the first competition. “We can't wait to see what students code as part of the challenge and where their new skills will take them."
Halfway through October, the CreateHS challenge for the month has already attracted attention—and participants from Denmark, Russia, and China.
CreateHS is by no means the first coding competition just for young people. Google Code-In, for example, which teaches teenagers about open source software development through a seven-week contest, is in its fourth year. But Ethan said he wanted to introduce a competition that focuses on the creative aspects of coding.
There are some competitions out there where it’s the standard to solve that problem, or make this solution. What separates mine from other competitions is that it emphasizes the point of creating. You provide code to show how you could do it. You don’t just solve a problem, you create something entirely new.
