Directi launches CodeChef for Indian school kids

Aims to enable Indian students to excel at the International Olympiad of Informatics

Internet products company, the Directi Group has launched an online programming platform, titled, 'CodeChef for Schools'.  The initiative, the company said, is an effort aimed and driven by Directi to enable Indian students to excel at the International Olympiad of Informatics (IOI) - one of the five academic Olympiads for high school students worldwide.
 
‘CodeChef for Schools’- is a non-commercial educational initiative of Directi to create a global community that fosters learning and friendly competition. An extension of the CodeChef program is the ‘Go for Gold’ initiative, a non-profit program launched three years ago to enable Indian teams to excel at the world finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM-ICPC), the most competitive programming challenge in the world.

 
CodeChef aims to promote competitive programming and encourage self-learning; the program will kick start by tapping school children from class 8 onwards. CodeChef for Schools has pledged a yearly support of $20,000 for this initiative.

These funds would be utilized for various purposes including sponsorship for students to help them participate in coding competitions, spends for enhancing their school’s IT infrastructure and a cash prize of Rs 5 lakh for the winner of the Gold Medal at the International Olympiads for Informatics. Most importantly, for every unclaimed prize, the sum will increase as per a formula devised by the CodeChef team, each year.

 
Bhavin Turakhia, Founder & CEO, Directi said, “CodeChef provides a platform for practice, competition and improvement for student and professional software developers across India. The CodeChef platform aims to reach out to school students while young and create a culture of programming in the country."

He added that almost 1,20,000 students are registered on the CodeChef platform, since 2009.
 
With ‘CodeChef for Schools’, Directi aims to bring school kids within its fold. As a part of this program, Directi will host monthly online coding contests, have online programming turorials, build Campus Chapters in various schools to help students learn programming from scratch.

CodeChef will also serve as a platform for bringing students closer to participating in competitions like IOI- International Olympiad for Informatics- one of the most recognized computer science competitions in the world where the contestants have to show basic IT skills as problem analysis, design of algorithms and data structures, programming and testing. It will also foster participation at the ACM ICPC- an annual multi-tiered competitive programming competition among the universities of the world.