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The Piggott School

A Church of England Academy

Twin success in computing challenge

Over 480 Piggott students from Years 7 - 13 took part in the Bebras Computational Thinking Challenge last November for a chance to make it through to the Oxford University Computing Challenge (OUCC), a prestigious event in computational thinking. 

Of that number, 50 Piggott students scored in the top 10% nationally, automatically giving them a place in Oxford University’s ‘invitation-only’ event.

The first round of the annual OUCC challenge is held online in schools, and supervised by teachers with participants' solutions auto-marked by the OUCC system.

Following this, the top 20 students in each age group are usually invited to Oxford University to compete in the final, but for obvious reasons, the final will be held remotely in 2021.

This year, Piggott twins Finlay and Oliver remarkably achieved a top 20 place after competing against 3,875 students nationwide in the Year 8 & 9 OUCC category. 

This is a remarkable achievement, “We are all super excited and so proud of Oliver and Finlay”, says Patranjali Bhattacharya, the Head of Computer Science at The Piggott School.

“As a department we work hard to organise a great number of activities and competitions every year to inspire our students. This competition started in November and wrapped up over lockdown, which made things more challenging to organise and I thank Miss Leonard for all her hard work with this. When we make break-throughs like this, it is very inspiring to us and our students. It keeps us even more motivated to carry on!”

This is the Piggott’s second year competing in the OUCC and last year, finalist Matthew Sullivan won the chance to spend the day at Oxford University to participate in the finals and attend seminars.

The OUCC is an invitation event which aims to encourage students to develop their skills further and produce programmed solutions to computational thinking problems.

We wish Finlay and Oliver all the best in the upcoming final tomorrow, Thursday 18th March. Follow The Piggott School on Twitter @PiggottCESchool to find out how the twins get on.