On June 3, 41 teams from Tesla STEM High School and Redmond High School participated in Microsoft’s annual “Hunt the Wumpus” game design competition. The teams brought home awards and received high rankings for their contribution.

Back in 1973, Hunt the Wumpus was one of the earliest games programmed on a computer. This year in Microsoft’s competition, students were challenged to implement a game that not only meets a specification for Hunt the Wumpus, but also adds innovative features and themes. Teams were allowed to use any languages and tools this year, including C#, Java, Python and many other related tools.

As part of Microsoft’s support for the competition, each class that participated in the competition was provided volunteer support of at least one experienced software engineer with background from local companies: Microsoft, Google and others.

Students got a taste of reality by working as a team to design, develop and test a coding project. They also had the chance to apply the coding skills and industry development practices they spent all year learning.

Here is a list of the teams, participants and the awards they won:

Lindsey Nielsen, Ananya Srivastava, Sarah Raza, Sanika Joshi, Ashley Luty and Deepti Ramani 
– first place, Most Innovative (“Omicron”)

Viraj Goyal, Raymond Guo, Sahil Kancherla, Nadav Levanoni, Lucian Petriuc and Niranjan Sahi 
– first place, Best Implementation (“Faze Clans”)

Noah Charleson-Sterritt, Michael Halim, Pinakin Kanade, Samarjit Kaushik and Aran Punniamoorthy 
– winners of the Student Choice Award (“Sytax Errors”) (1 of 3 awards)

Farris Chowdhury, James (Aiden) Linder, Siddhant Dharap, Natalie (Grace) Brigham, Jennifer Chou and Rohini Ravi – winners of the Student Choice Award (“Sigma”) (1 of 3 awards)

George Segress, Uma Sharma, Meghna Shankar, Alejandro Ayala and Joshua Wright 
– First runner up, overall 

Kion Bidari, Brayden Brackett, Kinner Parikh, Archit Patankar, Varun Wescott and Azhan Zaheer 
– second place, Most Innovative (“Oh, No!”)

Guy Hayardeny, Rachel Ren, Mukil Shanmugam, Ananya Jain, Harshit Pandy and Sathvik Kakanuru 
– second place, Best Implementation (“Alpha”)

Kishan Vijay Baliga, Viddy Baskar, Gabe Ervin, Yukito Shida, Jack Tribolet and Shaurya Vashisth 
– second runner up, (“How to Train Your Viddy”)

Sihajveer Gulati, Hans Koduri, Daniel Popa, Raj Sunku, Joshua Venable and Brian Yang
– third runner up, (“Artesian Code”)