ACE Coding Day brings CS to new generation By Carol Xu

Amador's ACE Coding club held their annual ACE Coding Day event on Saturday, May 14, welcoming over 80 elementary and middle school students across the Tri-Valley. Partnering with AV Hacks, AV UVAs, Girls Who Code, and other student-run STEM organizations, ACE Coding introduced attendees to the fundamentals of programming and the vast potential of computer science.

ACE Coding and AV Hacks collaborated to host the Amador Valley Hackathon, a one-day event each year that brings together programmers, artists, and STEM enthusiasts to build projects through code that can help the community. This year, the hackathon theme revolved around social impact.

"A big motto of AV Hacks is that we want to use technology to make the world a better place, [so] we want to encourage people to build projects that make the world a better place," said Aryan Jain (pictured left), officer of AV Hacks. (Carol Xu)

Once the event kicked off at 8 A.M., hackathon participants formed teams of one to four people and were given until 6:45 P.M. to work on their respective projects. Afterwards, a panel of student judges from AV Hacks judged each project based on creativity, functionality, presentation, and pitch, awarding prizes ranging from airpods to a Hyper X Gaming keyboard to the winners.

Mruthula Mohankumar (blue and white shirt)'s team builds their model for Teeter Time, a tutoring website that connects high school tutors to students in need of help with certain subjects. At a young age, Mohankumar found her passion for math and computer coding, inspired by her father who works as a software engineer. "[When] I found out there were more [programming] languages to learn, I started learning the basics of all of them, and I just started experimenting," she said. (Carol Xu)

From left to right: 8th graders Jason Zhan, Victor Yang, Allen Ding, and Neil Sarkar collaborate on their hackathon team project–a map that lists all the health code violations in Alameda County to advise residents on appropriate restaurants to eat at. "Me and Neil, we already decided to work together, and these two people [Yang and Zhan], we just saw them and said 'Do you wanna join our team?'" Ding described. Aside from making new friends, Ding likes being able to "make [his] own stuff" in the hackathon. (Carol Xu)

Both Bryce Riegels (left) and Yash Sambandam (right) started coding with Scratch from a young age. Their hackathon project is a website generator that proposes ideas to inspire global change and target important issues, like poverty. Riegels appreciates this opportunity to exercise his creativity at the hackathon. "I think it's really cool, [because] I get to make new things I wouldn't have otherwise," he said. (Carol Xu)

"We’re trying to give students the opportunities that we got ourselves to learn how to code, learn how to make things, and understand that when you learn how to code it’s really a superpower because you can create value for other people across the globe."– Aryan Jain ('23)

At 12 P.M., the ACE Coding Day commencement ceremony began in the small gym. (Carol Xu)

(Helen Huang)

Eager, young students streamed in and sat down among the rows of seats. (Helen Huang)

ACE Coding co-presidents Kush Nayak ('23) and Edward Ding ('22) welcome all participants to ACE Coding Day in the opening ceremony. (Carol Xu)

Co-president Nayak aims to promote the interest and engagement of computer science in younger generations throughout the community by holding free workshops to show the real-world applications of computer science. Passionate about programming, Nayak hopes to extend his interest to other students in the Tri-Valley Area. "Coding represents the future. Technology has the potential to solve a lot of our problems, and it really is the driving force of where we’re headed," said Nayak.

Sitting in the opening ceremony, Harvest Park sixth-grader Raymond Huang looked forward to learning more about hardware technology and advancing his software skills. "I find that coding helps to improve [our lives] because it’s technology, and technology really strengthens us because it allows [for] software apps in daily life and hardware [that] helps us with phones so we can google stuff," said Huang. (Carol Xu)

Following the ceremony, each student collected their individual schedules and headed off to their selected workshops. This year, ACE Coding offered a series of 13 diverse workshops with topics that ranged from web development to artificial intelligence to graphic animation. With the event divided into three workshop tracks, each one hour long with breaks in between, participants could sign up for three workshops of their choice.

In the workshop "Let's Go Racing," students were able to construct their own radio-controlled cars to learn about fundamentals of robotics and embedded software. They put together a fully functioning radio-controlled electric car, wired it up to a microcontroller, and programmed the microcontroller to take in inputs from a radio controller to spin motors. (Carol Xu)

Participants worked in groups with guidance from two ACE Coding student advisors to build their cars. (Carol Xu)

ACE Coding club member Vincent Wang ('22) co-ran and supervised the Racing Cars workshop. He hopes the hands-on experiences offered in the ACE Coding workshops can foster more interest in coding. "My hope for this is that students will see this, they’ll experience this and like it, they’ll go on to pursue their own things, learn more about robotics and get into it themselves, and eventually then go on to build their own even better creations," said Wang. (Carol Xu)

Following the first series of workshops, participants gathered back in the small gym for pre-prepared snacks and water. (Carol Xu)

From left to right: Kayla Belery-Dizon, Candace Joe, and Paloma Diaz Uribe enjoy their snacks outside the small gym. They had all gone to the Introduction to Cybersecurity workshop during Track I, which according to Joe was an enriching experience that "went by surprisingly quick." (Carol Xu)

For the workshop "Drones: How They Fly and How to Fly Them," ACE Coding worked with officers from Amador UAVs, a club that builds autonomous aerial vehicles. Members of this club covered the basic concepts of how drones fly and the recent technological advancements that have led to the development of drones. (Carol Xu)

The workshop participants also studied the controls associated with flying a drone and had the opportunity to fly a drone first-hand. Students also saw flight demonstrations of Macron, a 5-foot long octocopter that Amador UAVs developed this year for various competitions. (Carol Xu)

Fairlands Elementary School fifth-grader Claire Kim thought the drone experience was "pretty cool." Her interests in design and architecture intersect with the artistic elements in coding and programming, and she believes that code has far to go in the future. "A bunch of robots [could] take over the world," she joked. (Carol Xu)

"Animation with Python Turtle," another workshop collaboration with AV Girls Who Code, taught students basic animation techniques and skills with the platform Python Turtles, a programming interface that uses code to draw and animate shapes. (Carol Xu)

April Gong ('23), officer of Girls Who Code, co-taught the workshop with ACE Coding member Clara Yin ('24). "We had a lot of fun with the kids," Gong reflected. (Carol Xu)

The animation workshop piqued participant curiosity and creativity to create different shapes and movements. Participant Christian Ensign, a seventh grader from Pleasanton Middle School, enjoyed learning to create images and make them move in the animation workshop. "It was pretty fun and interesting," he said. (Carol Xu)

Ultimately, the ACE Coding club and their partners hope to spread more interest in different STEM-fields to rising middle and high school students. From robots capable of speech to artificial intelligence drones, programming continues to pave the way for the new technologies of the future that "make the world a better place," one segment of code at a time.

"Just being able to understand how this amazing technology works, and work with it by yourself by either programming or doing some low-level stuff with robotics or even working with wires is a great way to experience all [the potential in coding]," said Nayak. "I really enjoy programming, and I hope I can extend this passion throughout the entire community through these workshops."

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