25th November 2020

The Boo Challenge: Our pick of creative and original projects!

Throughout October we ran a competition for young people — The CoderDojo Boo Challenge! We invited participants to create projects relating to Halloween or the month of October. Check out some of the amazing coded creations below!

Who took part?

We received a spook-tacular 100 project entries from young people across 18 different countries. Most of the projects were built using Scratch, but we also received projects created with Python, HTML, C++ and more. We were astounded with the inventiveness and creativity on show — it was very tricky for our judges to select winners! The projects below really impressed the judges for their originality, creativity, technical skill…and of course spookiness! 

And the winners are…

The three projects we picked for their creativity, originality, and excellent use of code are listed below.

Thijs from the Netherlands wowed our judges with his project, Dancing Skeleton. Thijs used an impressive range of hardware to bring a cardboard skeleton to life — complete with glowing LED eyes! Thijs’ parent, Richard, told us to share this very nice message:

“Thijs is very pleased that he won a prize. He wants other children to know that he did not enter the challenge to win; he did it to do something he enjoys. He wants other children to enjoy developing and coding as it is fun”.

Akari from Japan created an awesome pumpkin Scratch game where the player must win back sweets from a mischievous ghost. Akari said: “I especially worked hard to switch cloud variables to characters. Cloud variables can only contain numbers, so I started converting numbers to English for the first time”. What a great learning experience — well done Akari!

Harvey from Scotland impressed the judges with his Scratch project, Pumpkin Run. The judges were especially impressed with how the game made use of different levels and included detailed instructions. Harvey was delighted to be given recognition for his efforts: 

“I enjoyed entering the competition and had great fun making my Halloween game. I had many technical challenges along the way, but I enjoyed tackling them to keep the game working! I loved sharing the game with family to see how well the game played so that I could improve it further. I was really proud of the end result and glad and excited that my hard work was rewarded, thank you so much!”

Congratulations Thijs, Akari, and Harvey!

Runners up

Peter from Nigeria made an amazing Halloween website, which really caught the judges’ attention. One of our judges said: “What a fantastic website. The theme is spot on for halloween. Love the animated title and countdown. There’s a lot of work gone into it so far and I definitely learnt some new things about Halloween”.

Iulia’s Candy Basket project also made a big impression with her creative use of Scratch and other elements!

Highly commended

Thank you to everyone who participated!

The team is incredibly proud of all the young people who took part — we know that it has been a challenging year and that many of you are not able to attend a Dojo the way you used to. Well done for taking the initiative and creating your project at home. We’d also like to say a big thank you to all the parents and volunteers who encouraged their young people to get involved. Parents, guardians, and volunteers: make sure to award our Boo Challenge certificate to your participants!

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