During Wednesday lunchtimes, a handful of students toil over intricate programs in teacher Debra Troxell’s classroom. These students are members of the Application Developers Club, which started earlier this school year.

For months, the club has been pondering how to get all these new members involved in the club and participate on a weekly basis. The answer: coding competitions. These competitions are regional events that schools from the Bay Area participate in. During competitions, programmers receive multiple timed questions that vary in difficulty, all asking for a written piece of code to answer the problem.

“Their questions are based on certain scenarios in which you are given a certain problem and you have to use code to find efficient ways to solve them,” junior and club president Sujay Khandekar said.

According to Khandekar, the coding tournaments require competitors to form teams of three students. Earlier this year Saratoga only had two teams to represent in the past Gunn and Harker coding tournaments, but the talent and experience displayed by these teams won Saratoga recognition at both these tournaments. The Gunn coding competition took place on Feb. 25, and the Harker competition took place on March 17.

Junior Eugene Che, sophomore Akshay Madhani and Khandekar, one of the two teams that represented Saratoga at the Gunn High competition, placed third overall. Trailing behind them were Senior Evan Ye, and juniors Matt Yee and Kabir Chandrasekher, who placed fourth overall.

“Our vice president Kabir told us about the Gunn competition and I thought that we should give it a shot and it turned out pretty great so we're going to keep running with it,” Khandekar said.

Following the Gunn competition was the Harker Invitational. Yee, Ye and Chandrasekher placed in the top 10 against other gifted teams, a very hard task to accomplish, according to Khandekar.

The club plans to attend the Stanford competition in May.

“These competitions are good way to constantly challenge ourselves and keep people focused on increasing their coding knowledge,” Khandekar said.  “I think they are a great way for us to push ourselves and learn new solutions and techniques.”