Remember our 10 Medallists at the 26th National Olympiad in Informatics (NOI) earlier this year?
We are dedicated to nurturing future leaders in technology, and as educators, we are always delighted to hear our students’ achievements and their kind words of appreciation for our efforts. We caught up briefly with our student, Ziv who had some words for us:
“The countless days spent practicing on websites, as well as attending classes at Coding Lab, have greatly contributed to achieving this milestone. However, I want to express my deepest gratitude to my parents, teachers, and friends, who have been like stars in the sky, always standing by me, watching over me, and guiding me through the treacherous jungle of life. Thank you for being my guiding light.”
– Ziv Lim, Zhonghua Secondary School and Silver Award Winner (NOI 2023)
Once again, congratulations on your Silver Award for NOI 2023 – and on your very first try! This prestigious competition is very reputable, and it is amazing to see what you achieved after all these years. Thank you, Ziv, for your message to us, and we’re incredibly proud to have played a part in your coding journey! We’re honoured to have been your guiding light, and we eagerly anticipate your future accomplishments.
Ziv Lim – NOI Silver Award Winner (2023) – His very first NOI Competition
We are thrilled to extend our heartfelt congratulations to our exceptional students, Chen-Xuan, Emrys and Prabir, who have achieved remarkable accomplishments in this year’s Hwa Chong Infocomm Challenge 2023! 🏆 Chen-Xuan, Emrys, and Prabir have each earned the prestigious Platinum award, the highest honour bestowed upon the top 1.5% of participants.
Such incredible achievements have brought forth a multitude of opportunities for our students. We acknowledge the results of our numerous Coding Lab students who also achieved a medal in 2023! Many of them have received confirmed DSA offers from their preferred schools, including esteemed institutions like NUS High, Hwa Chong Institution and SJI, among others.
These sterling results for HCIC 2023 not only continue the legacy of excellence but also magnify it. Our students have perpetuated the outstanding tradition, setting a high bar since Jun Ray’s achievement of securing 1st Position in the challenge back in 2019. We’re thrilled to note that this remarkable journey persists, with our 7 Platinum and Gold winners marking our triumph in HCIC 2022. We’re elated to witness our students’ growth, celebrate their feats, and stand by them in their journey of achievements. To all our extraordinary students, we extend our wholehearted congratulations once again! 💚
Interested to find out more? Check out the Python Programming and Elective courses we offer for Secondary school and Junior College students. At Coding Lab, we are committed to nurturing the next generation of tech enthusiasts, empowering them to transform their ideas into reality!
About the HCIC
The Hwa Chong Info-communications Challenge (HCIC) is an annual competition to kindle the flames of interest among primary school students within the realm of info-communications. It serves a dual purpose of not only fostering curiosity but also spotlighting prodigious talents in the spheres of programming, coding, and robotics. The year 2023 saw the competition unfold in May, with participants hailing from Singapore’s Primary 6 segment as well as overseas centers’ equivalent of Primary 5 or 6 students.
Once again, we’re glad for the opportunity to impart Python programming and Data Analytics to 40 fresh talents from the OCBC Graduate Talent Programme!
Our cheery participants from OCBC Bank who attended our Data Analytics Training Workshop in 2023!
The 40 participants from different departments of the bank ranging from HR and Marketing to IT worked in teams. Regardless of whether they had a background in programming, all were able to utilise their newfound Data Analytics skills for their business cases presentation at the end of the workshop.
Our educators, Stephanie and Hovan (left to right), also had lots of fun coaching the young talents and were enthused by their dedication during the 3-day workshop in 2023!
We know that the skills that they learnt will certainly come in handy in their careers and lives as we move towards a more digitalised society. We look forward to seeing these young talents shine in their fields of work!
We’re proud to have also partnered with IMDA and play a supporting role in Singapore’s efforts towards becoming a Smart Nation! Read more here.
Here at Coding Lab, we nurture future leaders in technology. Our teens (Ages 13-18) build a solid foundation in Python, and then move on to Electives such as Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and Game Development, where they move on to craft real-world solutions, preparing them for the future.
It is that time of the year again for the National Olympiad in Informatics (NOI), modelled after the International Olympiad in Informatics, the reknowned international competition in competitive computing. Emphasising creativity in problem-solving, as well as programming skills and expertise, this is an opportunity for students aged 13-18 to showcase their programming capabilities to their entire country.
The NOI competition consists of two rounds – the Online Qualification Contest and the Final Contest. Any number of students from each school can participate in the Online Qualification contest. Of the many students who participated, only the top 5 students from each school, at each level, are shortlisted for the Final contest and awarded medals.
After the two intensive rounds were finally completed on 18th March 2023, we are proud to announce that 10 of our students have obtained medals in the 26th NOI 2023!
Presenting to you Coding Lab’s 26th NOI Qualification Contest medallists:
Ziv Lim Zhengheng
Silver Medallist
Aanya Kaur Agrawal
Silver Medallist (previously a Bronze Medallist)
Caleb Chia
Silver Medallist (previously a Two-time Bronze Medallist)
Vayun Mathur
Four-Time Silver Medallist
Derrick Lukimin
Silver Medallist
James Pearman
Silver Medallist (previously a Bronze Medallist)
Bobby Lee
Bronze Medallist
Jaehyuk Cho
Bronze Medallist
Wongtreenatrkoon Jirapas
Bronze Medallist
Zhang Yanjia
Two-time Bronze Medallist
Special mention to Ziv Lim Zhengheng, who clinched the Silver Award in his very first NOI! This bright young coder has been attending classes with us since he was 9 and was also part of the Champion team for the National IMDA CodeXtremeApps (CXA) 2019 Hackathon. Other students who received a medal in their first NOI are Bobby Lee, Jaehyuk Cho and Wongtreenatrkoon Jirapas.
It is always great to see our students show improvement! We would like to commend Aanya Kaur Agrawal and Caleb Chia on achieving their firstSilver Medals, a step up from their Bronze Medals in 2022!
We would also like to congratulate Vayun Mathur on his fourth Silver Medal! He was one of our students who was featured on Google and the international news network CGTN before.
Congratulations and a big round of applause to all of our students! Their outstanding coding abilities in our classes got them selected for our intensive NOI Preparation Course (By Invite Only) – Like Ziv, many of them started with us early, whilst still in Primary school. Kudos to all of our students for their hard work!
Interested to find out more? Check out our proprietary Python Meets Math course, which incorporates O and A-Level Mathematics for ages 13 to 18 to pick up one of the most versatile programming languages. We also have Advanced Elective courses, which includes Data Analytics, Algorithm, Game Development, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Secondary school and Junior College students.
Congratulations to team Urban Coders (ages 13 to 18) for winning the “Sustainable City Development Award” at the 2022 Minecraft Cup! 🏆
The Minecraft Cup is held annually and the theme of 2022 was sustainability and creating an environment that integrates “nature” and “convenience” in the long run. Comprising of both local and Japan students, our young and talented students crossed borders and worked together to come up with innovative ideas.
Team Urban Coders created a city called CodeTropolis Nature. They focused on the United Nations’ Sustainability Development Goal 15, and created a city rich with biodiversity and green architecture that blends the urban landscape seamlessly into the surrounding wetlands refuge and nature preserves.
Take a look at their beautiful Minecraft world – CodeTropolis Nature!
Combining their creativity and care for the environment with the help of code, the team was awarded the Sustainable City Development Award, making them one of the four teams to get an achievement in Minecraft Cup 2022!
View the livestream of their presentation here!
In addition, they were also selected for the Tokyo Bay eSG project. Along with another one of our teams, team Wither Coders (ages 7-9), they will be presenting their project to the Governor of Tokyo, Yuriko Koike! If selected, our students will get to see their Minecraft project turn into real-life architecture.
It has been tremendously encouraging to watch our students come together (globally too!) with a pioneering idea to help in solving today’s real-world issues. All teams have worked hard and done their best, and we would like to congratulate them all for coming this far. 💚
Want to create your own complex structures and design your dream world on Minecraft? Explore the different possibilities that you can create with our Holiday SpecialMinecraft: Code Your World (ages 10-12) class!
This year, we had the opportunity to coach Woodgrove Primary, who won the Most Feasible and Sustainable Award in the National Thinkers Challenge 2022 by Singapore Hokkien Huay Kuan!
Out of 52 teams, the team placed in the top 3 and clinched 1 out of the 5 awards presented. This competition aims to let students think of innovative tech solutions and this year’s theme was food wastage, and the students created a prototype mobile app incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Here is the Woodgrove Primary Team during their Award Presentation!
Congratulations to the team who worked hard on their mobile app! They definitely deserved to be featured in 8world for their brilliant project. We are proud to be able to mentor these young talented coders and see the amazing work that they have created at the end of the journey. Thank you, Educator Edmund, for your brilliant coaching and mentorship of the team!
To boost Singapore’s Smart Nation capabilities, the inaugural National Thinkers Challenge (NTC) hopes to introduce to primary school pupils the concepts of design thinking, artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies. Organised by the Singapore Hokkien Huay Kuan, the competition this year drew 232 upper primary pupils from 37 schools.
We were featured in Lianhe Zaobao 联合早报, the largest Singapore-based Chinese-language newspaper, on 22 May 2022! As Singapore advances towards becoming a Smart Nation, what does it mean for younger kids who are learning to code today?
Read our full feature and hear from our Co-Founders, Yong Ning Foo and Candice Wang, as they share the importance of learning to code, their insights on the increasing demand for coding classes for children, and more about how they wanted to teach their children to code starting from a young age – which sparked the beginning of our MIT-inspired coding classes at Coding Lab!
Here at Coding Lab, we believe in nurturing future leaders in technology – with our coding classes carefully tailored to introduce coding to children as young as 5 years old, and thoughtfully curated to suit different age groups as well as varied experience levels. We adopt inquiry-based learning to encourage students to actively try and explore – something that is beneficial not just in the area of programming, but also in other areas in life.
“Coding is a new literacy in the digital age. I hope that my children can grasp this language and build up their computational thinking skills. The computational thinking ability will help to build new systems, simplify processes and solve problems in our daily lives.”
– Yong Ning Foo
Our award-winning coding curriculum is curated based on students’ learning abilities, with kinaesthetic activities and block-based programming for younger ones, and incorporates GCE ‘O’ and ‘A’ Level Mathematics for older ones.
Did you know? We have parents of two-year-olds who have registered on our waiting list for our Junior Coders’ Programme.
Lianhe Zaobao 联合早报 also featured our student, 10-year-old Theodore Lee, who learnt to code two years ago and joined Coding Lab when he was 9.
His mother, Queenie, observed that the biggest improvement in Theodore after learning to code was the development of computational thinking, and when met with problems, he will calmly think through the problem step-by-step for a solution.
Today, he is in our Advanced Electives class alongside teenagers ages 13 to 18, and learnt to code this high-level Covid-19 Pandemic Simulator project. Check it out below!
Theodore coded a project that simulated a pandemic based on toggable variables such as vaccination rate and hospitalisation rate. He was awarded Distinction and Most Promising Coder for his impressive entry in the Ages 13 to 18 category.
The amazing 10-year-old (he was age 9 at the time of the project) also did a block-based Scratch programming project rendition of his Covid-19 Pandemic Simulator project and achieved another Distinction and Most Innovative award.
Thank you to Mediacorp’s Channel NewsAsia (CNA) and Channel 8 for featuring Coding Lab on the news! Aired in both English and Mandarin respectively, we are honoured to have been a part of this segment on nurturing future leaders in technology in Singapore.
Filmed at our cosy yet conducive campus at Parkway Parade, the feature covered how kids are learning to code at a younger age and how this very skillset will benefit them in the future.
Our Co-Founder and Community Director, Candice Wang, shared with CNA on the coding trends in Singapore, and how Coding Lab is doing our part to ensure that children learn to code.
Watch our full interview and catch Teacher Evan in action with our Young Computer Scientists, where our students Ages 7 to 9 were exploring Music through Coding in class!
We’re excited to spread the joy of coding and to be able to share our story in the mainstream media. We look forward to more opportunities like this in the future!
We’re proud to be featured in The Straits Times today! In Singapore’s English flagship newspaper, we shared our experience and thoughts on bridging the gender gap in the area of STEM.
“Given the right environment, girls can realise their potential,” our Director, Candice Wang, says. She is also a proud mother in the STEM field whose daughter attends weekly classes at Coding Lab.
A snippet of our feature on The Straits Times (9 February 2021, Monday, LIFE)
“Given the right environment, girls can realise their potential,”
Did you know that at Coding Lab, we ensure a gender-neutral environment to encourage students of all genders and ages to code? Some examples of how we do so include:
Showcasing a good mix of projects by girls and boys
Building programs, games and animations around students’ favourite cartoons and topics (eg. Disney shows and princesses)
Our superstar coder and University of Texas (Austin) scholarship recipient, Sarah Go, is also featured! She talks about her experience as a female in STEM and how her parents and environment has helped her to excel. Read her blog features here and here.
(Written by Cheryl Tang)
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This year’s bumper crop of medallists includes 1 Silver and 7 Bronze winners who are between 13 and 17 years old! Our winning students have been learning C++ and growing with us after being spotted in their Python classes for their programming prowesses. It is truly a great sight to see them flourish and become phenomenal medallists!
NOI spots are reserved for every school’s top students to participate, so only few can represent their school, and only the best can attain medals in the Olympiad. We’re even more proud of the fact that many of our medallists came to us as complete beginners in programming (some started at the age of 10!), and were carefully nurtured in our classes right under the noses of our eagle-eyed tutors to achieve their results. Well done!
Presenting to you Coding Lab’s 23rd NOI medallists:
Vayun Mathur, 15
Silver Medallist
Kushaan Mishra, 17
Bronze Medallist (First Attempt)
James Pearman, 14
Bronze Medallist (First Attempt)
Caleb Chia, 13
Bronze Medallist (First Attempt)
David Walton, 15
Bronze Medallist
Faiz Ali Shoaib, 17
Bronze Medallist
Bobis Franc Ivan Lorenzo, 16
Bronze Medallist
Elijah Yong, 14
Bronze Medallist
Silver Medallist
Vayun Mathur, 15
Singapore American School
Vayun (left) won a Silver Medal at the NOI
The Olympiad is one of Computing’s biggest annual competitions in Singapore and the Silver Medal is awarded to the top 20% of participants. We’re so proud of our young innovator for being 1 of the 32 Silver Medallists this year! An Olympiad medal is highly recognised for admissions to top universities around the world. During the competition, contestants are given five hours to work out solutions to algorithmic tasks. This does not only require skills such as programming and testing, but also Mathematics and in-depth knowledge of designing algorithms, data structures and information theory.
Our bright student Vayun has been in the news before, with features on Google and international news network CGTN. He has performed well once again and we congratulate Vayun on getting the Silver Medal!
Coding Lab’s Bronze Medallists made up 7 of the 49 Bronze Medallists in this year’s NOI. As one of the most prestigious computer science competitions, it’s not an easy feat to attain medals and our 3 students did Coding Lab and their schools proud when they emerged as bronze medallists on their first attempts! Our youngest medallist, Caleb Chia (just 13 years old!), has been with us since he was in primary school and we’re proud of his growth! All participants had to undergo a Preliminary Round to qualify for the NOI. Despite being new to the competition, our students ranked well and went on to clinch medals at the NOI.
(from left) Kushaan, James, Coach Guangxuan, Jun Ray and Caleb
We are proud of our students’ remarkable achievements and commend their hard work to overcome the odds, especially during this pandemic. A round of applause for Kushaan, James and Caleb!
4 Bronze Medallists
Elijah (left) and David at NOI 2019
David Walton, 15
United World College SEA Dover Campus
Faiz Ali Shoaib, 17
United World College SEA Dover Campus
Elijah Yong, 14
Anglo-Chinese School Independent
Bobis Franc Ivan Lorenzo, 16
Gan Eng Seng School
These 4 students were able to pit their computing skills against talented coders from more than 30 other schools and gain invaluable experiences in the Olympiad. Their consistent effort and hard work paid off as they took on programming tasks and made their mark at the reputable NOI.
This year’s medallists include Elijah Yong, who was awarded Youngest Medallist in last year’s NOI. The 14-year-old has been with us since he was a Primary Five student, when we spotted his potential and invited him to join our NOI programme. The Coding Lab team is proud to have seen him grow over the years into a confident teenager with medals under his belt and we commend him for his consistent hard work!
Elijah receiving award for Youngest Medallist, NOI 2019
The Coding Lab team is proud of our students for clinching the Bronze Medals, and we celebrate their achievements. Great job David, Faiz, Bobis and Elijah!
Congratulations to our outstanding students! We’re proud of our 8 students for coding their way to the top with their tenacity and hours of training, even overcoming the Covid-19 pandemic. They had been training once a week since the beginning of the year to prepare for the NOI and it was heartening to see their hard work pay off! We also thank Coach Guangxuan for his dedication, training and guidance of our students.
