Time flies... The students of the Girl’s Programming Club have finished the last club session of the semester. SHSID Girls’ Programming Club has mainly focused on three aspects for the past semester: gaining more advanced knowledge on web crawlers for images and short videos, preparing for competitions, and creating three group projects.

The club supervisor, Mr. He, taught them about web crawlers through last semester’s club activities. In this semester, Mr. He brought them more comprehensive content. For example, they learned the difference between single-threading web crawlers and multi-threading web crawlers. Seeing the significant increase in speed during runtime by using the multi-threading method was so amazing and innovational to them. Having a program up and running is cool, and further improving its performance is motivating as well. During club sessions, members were encouraged to navigate around with the code by themselves to get better understanding of how each segment of the code worked and also to learn more about web crawlers.

Besides the exciting learning activities, they also achieved some good results in programming competitions. Some of the awards are as follows: ACSL Team Gold and individual top score for the senior division, ACSL Team Bronze and individual top score for the intermediate division, and USACO silver.

Additionally, throughout the semester, the club members (Cynthia, Julia, and Sophia) completed three independent projects using Python. As STEM students, they often encountered complex computing problems. They created the Advanced Calculator, a combination of calculators for some frequently encountered questions into one single online tool. All calculators were completely written by themselves except for the usage of the Python libraries’ math, matplotlib, and Flask. The project was a tool that aimed to help students, or even professionals, perform calculations in STEM fields.

The second project, “Chess Game”, was composed of two Tic-Toc Toes, with 9 larger grids each composed of 9 smaller grids. The chess game became popular in the school community, and the students decided to implement it using technologies and composed an artificial intelligence to play with the users.

The third project was a ball simulator with a replaceable image, changeable window size, and considered physics properties such as acceleration and velocity vectors. The ball's velocity could be managed by using the up-, down-, right-, and left-arrow keys on the keyboard. This simple project was implemented through Pygame.

As always, the Girls’ Programming Club created a wonderful platform for those who love programming to grow, excel, and thrive!

(Written by Adelynn Tang, Sophia Zhu Pictures and Videos by Adelynn Tang and Sophia Zhu Supervised by Tianzhou Reviewed by Qian Zuo)