The year 2019-2020 was certainly an exciting and thrilling deal for all our College Chapters. For the uninitiated, a CodeChef College Chapter is a programming club where the passionate learners meet. A community of budding coders, a Chapter is led by a Chapter Leader, and guess who mentors this thriving community? That’s right, it’s CodeChef. We’re currently spread over more than 100 colleges across the country, and if your college doesn’t have a Chapter yet, we’ll get to you soon. Our Chapters hosted over 350 events, out of which 175+ were contests, and 125+ were workshops, and that’s just in this year.
With the annual cycle drawing to a close, we decided to share with you all the happy memories this year left us with. Our Chapter Leaders were hard at work throughout the year, and all that work certainly paid off as by the end of the year, we had nearly 55,000 new programmers sign up on CodeChef. Pardon us as we gloat, but here’s how the journey has been in the past year.
Chapters That Went Beyond Their Call Of Duty.
One of the most heartwarming events of last year was when the chapter UEMK opened up their workshop to school kids. It was a sweet gesture and it introduced the students present to a world of coding possibilities. We hope the children went home with a treasure trove of knowledge that they’ll cherish forever.
SAGETECH, the College Chapter of the Sage University Indore, organized a one-day women only workshop, to introduce Python to the women present. We saw the coders engage with rigorous interest and enthusiasm, and it was extremely rewarding to see the beginning of a more inclusive coding community.
The Code-In workshop was also one of the women-only workshops. It was held late in February, by the College Chapter code_blooded, from the college Indira Gandhi Delhi Technical University for Women. The workshop focused around Recursion, Priority Queue, and Hashmaps. It pushed the attendees out of their comfort zone, and helped them explore coding in a much wider sense. Our Chapters loved organizing both the Shoot_Py and the Code-In workshops, and we hope the students had just as much fun participating.
This Year’s Brain Babies.
This year had an entire electrifying vibe, and the CodeChef College Chapters thrived better than ever before. We look at the College Chapters as a fraternity, and we wanted to bring everyone together, build a connected community where all Chapter Leaders can support each other, and build meaningful relationships. Racking our brains, we eventually came up with the idea of having a single WhatsApp group for all our Chapter Leaders. Well, that was a success of all kinds, and if you were to sneak a peek into the chats, you’d certainly find a few tricks of the trade being shared among all the members. As our Chapter Leaders communicated on the groups, they came up with a brilliant idea of hosting a contest that came to fruition as “Campus Chapters Contest 1.0” that was held from the 2nd of April to the 5th of April. Over here, we saw an amazing platter of nine problems and an equally amazing amount of participation from you guys. The contest saw a lot of love with over 33,000 submissions. Our Chapter Leaders absolutely enjoyed hosting this contest and they look forward to having more of these again.
We are always looking for a diverse community and the Chapter Leaders of the various College Chapters did a great job this year ensuring that female coders across India got ample opportunities to learn and improve. With over 13,000 women across India signing up on CodeChef this year, it is very heartening to see such progress.
The Love We Saw.
As the year ended, we reached out to all our College Chapters and asked them how their experience had been. We got a lot of heartening responses, and we would like to share a couple of them with you.
CodeChef College Chapter Initiative has provided us with an opportunity to gain experience in the field of team management, marketing, business, and much more, which we cannot have achieved by our regular curriculum. We have learned the art of interacting with people as professionals. Inevitably there were ups and downs along the way, but we learned how to overcome them as a team. College Chapter Initiative motivated us to not only sharpen our competitive coding skills but also allowed us to share our knowledge with the students of our campus. It has been a memorable journey till now, and we are eagerly looking forward to the next year
~The SRM_Chapter.
“Being a CodeChef Chapter Lead, I would say that I was able to initiate the process of hosting regular contests to develop the coding culture in the college to a large extent, thanks to CodeChef, so that people would get more exposure. It was awesome to be a part of the campus chapters and we had an amazing coordinating experience with the CodeChef team. Being a part of the campus chapters contest team has helped me to gain more experience too, looking forward to some more contests like this. In one word I would like to sum up the whole experience as Awesome.”
~ Chennai_coders
This has been a splendid year, that left us with a ton of memories to cherish. We are going to look back on it with a lot of nostalgia, but at the same time, we are also excited about what the coming year will bring us. We hope that you will be a part of our journey and join your College’s Chapter or start a new one. Looking forward to seeing you next year!!
