From Saint Joseph’s Catholic Academy
Saint Joseph’s students Kyle Yangula and Anthony Woomer placed 3rd in Coding and Programming competition at the 72nd Annual Pennsylvania FBLA (Future Business Leaders of America) State Leadership Conference in Hershey, April 17 -19, 2023. The students also earned the opportunity to compete in the FBLA National Leadership Competition in Atlanta at the end of June.
For the competition, Yangula and Woomer were challenged to write and present on an original functional computer program designed to improve student involvement at school activities. At the competition, the Saint Joseph’s students had to run their program as well as effectively explain their design process and its benefits.
“We started (writing the program) way back in November and made our final edits the night before our performance,” Yangula said. “Anthony coded the main inner portions of the program while I helped more with the visual output/branding and design process.”
“We named the program StudiPate. It was a combination of Student and Participate,” Yangula said. It is coded in Python with Tkinter for the GUI and JSON for data storage.
StudiPate allows users, such as teachers and principals, to track attendance at school community service and sporting events, to assign points to students who attend, and to give rewards for participation. It can also generate a report to show points per student in each grade.
“Although Kyle and I made it so that a school can change the rewards given for each category, we placed default rewards that we thought would be fun,” Woomer said. “The highest-scoring student received ten bonus points for a class of his or her choice, the highest-scoring class received a pizza party, and the randomly selected students received a school-themed foam hand.”
“We are constantly coming up with new ideas or better ways to implement different features in our program,” Yangula said. “We still have more ideas and edits we would like to make before we compete in Atlanta this June.”
Four additional Saint Joseph’s students competed at the FBLA conference: Colten Woomer in Economics, Akio Ohmoto in Social Media Strategies, and Colin Simander and Spencer Gigante in Business Management. This is Saint Joseph’s first year as a new FBLA chapter.
The purpose of FBLA is to provide, as an integral part of the instructional program, additional opportunities for secondary students (grades 9–12) in business and/or business-related fields to develop vocational and career supportive competencies and to promote civic and personal responsibilities. At the Pennsylvania State Leadership Conference (SLC), students can network, develop their leadership skills, and visit exhibitors and vendors. For more information, please visit pafbla.org.
[Photo: Saint Joseph’s students Anthony Woomer and Kyle Yangula, placed 3rd in Coding and Programming competition at the 72nd Annual Pennsylvania FBLA State Leadership Conference in Hershey.]
