Talented student Harvey Yau from Dyffryn Taf School came first in his age group in a UK-wide computing competition - The UK BEBRAS Computational Thinking Challenge - held at the Department of Computer Science at Oxford University on last Saturday.

Winning the competition is an impressive achievement, as 5,174 students entered the first round of the Elite age group category (Years 12 and 13), and 43 top-achieving students took part in the final at Oxford.

Harvey was presented with his winner’s certificate at a prize-giving ceremony at Hertford College.

The UK BEBRAS Computational Thinking Challenge, supported by Google, is designed to get students excited about computing and computational thinking. It is a problem-solving contest with questions inspired by topics in computer science.

In the first round, held in their own schools, students have to try and solve as many problems as possible in the allotted time. There are six age categories. The highest scoring students from the four oldest age groups (Elite, Senior, Junior and Intermediate) were then invited to the Department of Computer Science at Oxford for the finals over two weekends in January and February.