Penn Hills High School coding team wins top prize of $10,000 at annual competition

The Penn Hills High School coding team brought home a trophy and a little green from the 2024 Young Innovators: Code for Your Cause competition.

This is the third year Penn Hills has made an appearance at the competition hosted by PNC. It’s open to all local high schools. To compete, schools are required to create a team of five to six students with at least half the team identifying as female.

This year, teams were tasked with designing and developing a technology solution to solve environmental, social or accessibility issues occurring in their school. Each team worked with a group of PNC mentors who are tech professionals with ‘experience at all levels of development within PNC.

The Penn Hills team joined students from Elizabeth-Forward, Plum and Woodland Hills at the final presentations with their prototype of a device that clips onto a school recycling bin and sends notifications to the cleanup crew of when and where a bin needs to be emptied.

“The goal was to increase the efficiency of recycling in our building — and potentially throughout our community,” said the team’s coach, Teddy Gabrielson. “The students titled the device the ‘Echo System’ because it helps our ecosystem and uses echo technology from ultrasonic sensors.”

Gabrielson said the prototypes students built were paid for with a donation from the Nate Ferraco Memorial Fund.

“Our kids did an incredible job showing off not only the usefulness of the product, but sharing a plan for how it could be affordably implemented,” Gabrielson said. “The judges were truly impressed.”

After presenting their product to the panel of judges, giving a live demonstration of it in action and answering several rounds of questions, the six-person team won the Innovative Solution Award and took home prizes including $10,000 for their classroom.

The team is made up of junior and senior students — Caleb Lohr, 18, Caidyn Thomas, 18, Emma Macioce, 17, Beverly Smider, 18, Amira Johnson, 17, and Tagir Zaynullin, 18.

“I plan to use the prize money for some great new tech for the coding classes that I teach at the school,” Gabrielson said. “Specifically, I would like to purchase a class set of new Raspberry Pi workstations as well as charging stations for the kids to charge their own devices while coding at their desks. I would also like to use some of the money to fund future coding competitions at the school.”

Gabrielson, a Penn Hills alumni, has been teaching computer science at the high school for more than 20 years.

“The Penn Hills Coding Team is an unofficial organization at the school, and coaching the team is a voluntary position,” Gabrielson said. “We’ve been entering competitions like this on and off for many years. I, honestly, don’t remember when I started doing it.”

He also coaches the school’s Games Club and Esports teams.

“Teaching can be exhausting, but watching kids achieve something great never gets old,” Gabrielson said. “We have hundreds of truly amazing kids at the high school, and it felt great for these judges to get a glimpse of what I see every day.”