HT Codeathon wins multiple awards at the 2021 INMA Global Awards

Media houses, like any other business, need to innovate constantly in order to increase revenue, audience, and brand visibility amidst a constantly evolving market. The International News Media Association (INMA) helps companies in this business to implement best practices for growth. Yesterday, in a ceremony broadcast via INMA.org, YouTube, and Facebook Live, INMA announced the winners of its 2021 Global Media Awards. In this annual event, INMA rewards outstanding achievements in these categories: surfacing innovation and best practices in news brands, optimising the use of media platforms, subscriptions, business development, and data and insights.  

This year, HT Codeathon won 4 awards in various segments. Here is the list of rewards that this Coding Olympiad won:  

• Best in Show (South Asia)  
• Best Use of an Event to Build a News Brand (National Brands): First Place 
• Best Idea to Grow Advertising Sales (National Brands): First Place 
• Best Product and Tech Innovation (National Brands): Third Place 

HT Codeathon also achieved an honourable mention in the Best Initiative to Register Users category. In 2021, the competition for INMA Global Media Awards was held among 212 news media brands including newspaper, magazine, digital media, television and radio across 37 countries.  INMA has been presenting awards for media excellence since the year 1937. 

What is HT Codeathon?  
The Hindustan Times Codeathon is a Coding Olympiad launched in October 2020 in association with the Delhi Government. The aim was to emphasise the significance of coding for the younger generation, help boost their critical skills, logical thinking and problem-solving skills. This initiative was also meant to create avenues for free access to coding for the underprivileged. HT Codeathon was open for students from class VI to class IX. This event saw over 61,000 registrations from 10,000 schools where 13,000 students were provided the opportunity to learn programming languages such as HTML, CSS, Java Script and Python. Pupils from classes VI to IX learnt website designing with HTML, CSS and Java Script through videos, while those from senior classes (VIII-IX) were trained to develop games with Python.  

In this two-month-long event, 400 finalists competed in December through tests, assessments and projects. Winners were declared in the categories of website development with HTML and game development with Python. While all 12 winners took home the latest gadgets and certificates and workshops with HT for prizes, 50 students among the 9,659 students sponsored by IBM also won gifts and certificates. All the while, participants were mentored by technical experts.  

With the rising demand for coding and other new-age skills, HT Codeathon was a big step in the right direction. It encouraged students embrace and cultivate interests in the rapidly growing field of STEM learning.