Tan Yiwen, a student from Keyuan School in Longgang District, has come out on top at the junior high school group of the fourth national App Inventor competition held at Google’s Beijing headquarters on November 26.

After two rounds of auditions, Tan was one of the 23 teams that had made it to the finals. The jury consisted of professors from renowned universities such as Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, Capital Normal University as well as experts from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Google.

Tan’s app, “Snake and Beehive,” won the first prize in the junior high school group. Unlike the well-known mobile phone game “Snake,” the background of his design is a hexagonal beehive, through which the snake moves along in six directions. There are also some novel elements such as “royal jelly” that endues the snake with superpowers, a portal that enables the snake to travel through time and space, as well as beeswax that can eliminate obstacles.“In order to perfect the game, he made eight versions altogether. The production phase lasted five months, and he was still revising the code before the design was submitted,” said Tan’s tutor.

“A design with a unique concept, handy use and highly technical content” — this is the unanimous appraisal of the judges to Tan’s “Snake and Beehive.”

Starting from 2014, the App Inventor competition has drawn extensive attention from the society as maker education is on the upsurge. This year, it received more than 1,300 entries from more than 200 primary and junior high schools across the country.

(Zhang Yu)