While it’s no secret that Rye Country Day School is known for its strong academic programs, the institution is also slowly making a name for itself in the tech sphere.
The school’s Development Club, a student-led computer science and technology group, is starting up again this semester after back-to-back coding competition championships.
Two RCDS Wildcat teams competed against 20 others in the TigerHacks Coding Competition at Greenwich Country Day School back on Nov. 9, 2024. Three students took first place – Xavier Perkins, Rhys de Haan, and Jaymin Ding — marking the second year in a row the school won the competition.
Another group of RCDS students – juniors Charles Iwanski, Xindi Liu, and Arav Ramaswamy – placed fifth in that competition back in November.
The contest consisted of each team getting three hours in a classroom to solve nine high-caliber coding questions that test the teams’ knowledge of data structure, algorithms, and more. Each classroom had a whiteboard, which by the end of the competition was saturated with complicated drawn-out math problems.
Whichever team solves all or most of the the problems the fastest, wins.
“They give us pizza, they give us water, and they basically leave us there for three hours trying to solve these problems,” said Perkins, a junior and Development Club vice president, who joined the team in 2023.
Perkins has been interested in computer science his whole life, he said, and recalled teaching himself scratch coding with YouTube tutorials on his family’s home computer in the fourth grade. Scratch, created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is a program that teaches children and beginners how to code stories, games, and animations.
“I think that was the start of passion for computer science,” Perkins said.
De Haan, a senior and co-president of the club, remembers playing around with his first Arduino kit — a product that teaches kids the basics of coding and electronics using a physical circuit board — alongside his brothers when he was in eighth grade.
“I’ve always been interested in computers, but taking AP [Computer Science A] made me realize that this is something I want to do with my life,” de Haan said.
The senior said he joined the school’s Development Club to further his skills.
Ding, another senior on the first place TigerHacks team and co-president of the Development Club, sees programming as a means to create whatever he wants. He said his mom signed him up for a coding class, which first got him interested in technology.
“I think computer science is not only blossoming as a field itself but also becoming a really powerful tool in other fields,” he said.
Ding said he’s interested in how computer science can be used to aid in physics and astrophysics research, as well as software development to address some of the challenges society faces today.
“I want to continue doing software development that is kind of human-centric, and that hopefully will be able to help others in the future,” he said.
Darien Cruté, the Development Club adviser, attributed the team’s success entirely to the students.
“For the most part, since it is a student club, I try to just stay more hands off and just be a support system,” he said.
According to Cruté, the students are looking forward to learning more about software testing and AI this spring.
The Development Club’s first meeting this semester will be on April 8.
