Kochi: A 14-year-old Keralite boy has emerged national champion at a coding contest. Subhash Shine, a Class 8 student of Ashram High School, Perumbavoor has won the first rank in the All India Coding Championship organised by CuriousJr, an online coding platform for kids.

Around 25,000 students from across the country participated in the competition.

Shashwat Acharya from Darjeeling and Saion Gupta from New Delhi have secured second and third ranks respectively.

Elated on winning the first prize, Subhash Shine said, “I am overjoyed to have won the competition. This was the nicest thing that happened to me in the new year.” Subhash has been learning coding from CuriousJr since 2021.

The coding competition was the second edition of India’s first mobile coding championship. The competition was divided into two groups: Group A for students in classes 6-8 and Group B for students in classes 9-12. In Group A, the competition was based on block coding, and in Group B, it was based on Java Script.

"Winners were picked based on two criteria," Janishar Ali, CuriousJr. cofounder noted. The first is the code's accuracy, and the second is the time it takes to answer the problem statement."

The All India coding championship allows all students to participate in the national level competition. This kind of accessibility enables students from all around the country to shine and demonstrate their potential. The scholarship worth was Rs 10 lakh was given to the winners of the competition.

On the competition results, Mridul Ranjan Sahu, co-founder, CuriousJr said, “We strongly believe that constant skilling, upskilling, and reskilling is the way to create an efficient mind in the country. The success of the event has further motivated us to continue encouraging and hosting such competitions that would encourage the students to showcase and evaluate their skills.”

CuriousJr is a Gurugram-based online platform founded in 2020 to enable code learning for children between 8 and 17. It is mobile-first, provides lessons in vernacular languages, and enables publishing and sharing of creations by students within the larger community.