The Arkansas Department of Education (ADE) Office of Computer Science is pleased to announce the sixth annual Governor’s All-Region and All-State Coding Competition. This year’s competition is sponsored by ARCodeKids and Microsoft Philanthropies. This competition is open to Arkansas public, private, and homeschooled school students in grades 8-12.

This competition, which has had more than 1,500 students participate in the first five years, has been funded previously by $260,000 in grants from Verizon. Microsoft Philanthropies is providing funding for this year’s competition.   

This year’s competition will include regional qualifying competition events and a state-level competition. The regional events are scheduled to take place on Friday, February 25, 2022, and the state competition is scheduled for Saturday, April 30, 2022. 

Due to the success and participation of our regional events over the past two years, it has been decided that the regionals will remain digital. The state competition event will be in-person on the University of Central Arkansas campus in Conway, Arkansas.

The ADE Office of Computer Science has established a webpage to provide interested parties with information regarding regional and state competition: 

• locations, dates, and time;
• rules;
• registration information and process; and
• contact information.

Each team member of the 1st place team will receive a $2,000 award; 2nd place team members will each receive a $1,000 award; and members of the 3rd place team will each receive a $500 award. These awards will be provided as deposits into established 529 College Savings Plans.

Schools that sponsor the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place teams will receive the following awards to support their computer science program:

• 1st Place - $10,000
• 2nd Place - $6,000
• 3rd Place - $4,000

The above-referenced webpage may be accessed via the ADE website at cs.arkansas.gov or directly by using this link: http://bit.ly/ARCodingComp. This dedicated webpage will be updated as information is released.