Meet the 11-year-old who won the School District’s first-annual coding competition

Philip Parkinson was determined to get his note-taking app in the App Store.

Parkinson, a fifth grader at Stephen Decatur School in the Northeast, got rejected twice. But finally, on the third try, Apple accepted it. One month later, he won first place in the elementary school coding category at the School District’s first annual TEC (Technology Expo and Competition) Showcase.
That’s where we met him last week, at the showcase, held at School District HQ.
Parkinson, 11, of Parkwood in the Far Northeast, is pint-sized and awfully polite. When the School District’s Chief Information Officer, Melanie Harris, came over to tell him that the competition’s judges were “blown away” by the caliber of his app, he shook her hand and said, “It’s an honor to meet you.” (Harris said she downloaded Philip’s app, Quickie Notes, that day.)
Download Quickie Notes
It was his grandfather, Bill Zebrowski, SEPTA’s Chief Information Officer, that got him interested in tech. Zebrowski told Philip about online education site Lynda.com, which Zebrowski’s team at SEPTA had used for some projects, so Philip bought a subscription of his own — with help from his parents, he said. (We met Phil’s father, who works as a plumber, at the School District that day, too.)
He said he built the app because he didn’t like Apple’s Notes app. Also, Lynda had a tutorial focused on building a note-taking app with Swift in Xcode. It took him about six months, and his computer teacher, Melanie Channick, let him work on it during computer class and also leant a hand. He plans to add more features.
We asked him if his friends were coders too.
“No,” Parkinson said. “They think I’m a god.”
His father laughed. “So do I.”

200 students, 20 schools

The School District has held a computer fair for more than ten years, but this was its biggest one yet. It was the first time that the District opened the fair to grades three through five and it also added categories like coding, multimedia (including video and PowerPoints) and digital art. Public, private and charter schools are all allowed to submit their students’ best work and winners go on to the state fair next month. It’s a way to showcase the creativity and skill of students across the city, said Jan Sing Tong, the tech program specialist who helped organize the event.

Nearly 200 students from 20 schools participated this year, submitting more than 100 projects, Tong said. That’s double the size of last year’s computer fair.

The showcase, which went from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. and closed with an awards ceremony in the District’s auditorium, included sessions on augmented reality, a Chrome Lego simulator and astronomy via mobile planetarium. The District’s IT department gave tours of their in-house TV studio (which broadcasts events like School Reform Commission meetings) and its top-notch network infrastructure. The Digital Service Fellows also led a session on repairing computers.

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Meet some of the other first-place winners below. See all the winners here.

Ethan Chen (right) and Mitchell Harrill-Wright, both 12, of Penn Alexander, who built a video game in Scratch called Catch My Plane. They won first place in the middle school coding category. They said it was their computer teacher Pete Endriss who, in his twice-a-week class, taught them how to use Scratch, among other tools like Garage Band and Google SketchUp.

Watch Ethan play the game for us:

Kahleah Brown, 15, Josiah Muledi (center), 17, and Trey Thornton, 16, of Carver High School of Engineering and Science, won first place in the high school programming category for their educational space shooter game. They built it in Unity.

Chelsea Walker, Rayanna Smith and Andrea Rogers, fifth graders at Mt. Airy’s F.S. Edmonds, won first place in the elementary school multimedia category for their video about Koresh Dance Company, which offers free dance classes at their school. Computer science teacher Stacy Bricker advised the team.