Blaise Ulric Sy Banico, a Year 6 Filipino-Australian student from Seabrook, won the Wyndham Coding Champs Competition for the Senior (age 12-15) Game category. Wyndham Coding Champs is an annual competition organised by Wyndham City Libraries, where 7-15-year-olds submit their animation or game developed with the Scratch programming language. Blaise’s game, The Ninja Spaceship Escape, bested over 50 entries submitted. The award ceremony was held at the Point Cook Library on 11 November 2022 and was officiated by Wyndham’s Deputy Mayor Jasmine Hill.
In October, Blaise, along with his father, Jason Banico, also received Runner-Up and Honourable Mention awards during 2022 GovHack. GovHack is an international competition organised by the Australian government that seeks forward-thinking people of all abilities and challenges them to apply creativity, problem solving and critical thinking skills to design a project that addresses challenges using open data. The father-son team’s project is a concept for JESSICA (Junior Environmental Science Student Information and Collaboration App), a platform for students to participate in citizen science activities. For the competition, Blaise built the demo prototype, also using the Scratch programming language, and presented the concept in a YouTube video.
Blaise’s dad, Jason, credits these accomplishments to Blaise’s interest in programming, which started when he was 4-years old. Jason, a software engineer by profession, recognised Blaise’s interest in solving puzzles and encouraged him to develop his programming skills through free online courses from Code.org, a non-profit organisation for free computer science education, supported by the likes of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, and Swift Playgrounds, a free educational app developed by Apple for learning the Swift programming language.
Blaise continues to learn and develop his programming skills and hopes to become a software engineer someday. He is currently learning the Python programming language through the online learning platform, Udemy.
