A programming class for over 1,700 students will be held to break the Guinness World Record for the 'world's largest programming class.'



Guinness World Records often features challenges that draw large numbers of people, such as 700 people playing dodgeball , 152 men and women taking the same shower , and the Guinness World Record for the most people playing at the same venue at the same time, recorded by the trading card game ' Yu-Gi-Oh! ', and the Guinness World Record for the most people participating in the same tournament during the tournament period. On October 12, 2024, an attempt was made to break the Guinness World Record for the world's largest programming class, with a class attracting over 1,700 people, more than double the previous record.

Teaching the world's largest programming lesson | mathspp
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The largest computer programming class held in a single venue was held in Dallas, Texas on October 31, 2016, with 724 attendees.

The event, held in Portugal by programming research and education company Magma Studio and the Higher Technical University of Lisbon to break the Guinness World Record, featured three sections designed for people with no programming experience. It started by introducing students to the concept of algorithms, then showed them how to write Python code to turn algorithms into programs that computers can run. Finally, it explained more advanced algorithms, such as the Game of Life , a mathematical model invented by John Horton Conway in 1970. The class was taught by programmers as well as professors from the Higher Technical University of Lisbon.

The following photo was taken by Rodrigo, a programmer who led the project. Rodrigo is a graduate of the Lisbon Polytechnic University and proposed the idea for this project based on his experience working at Magma Studio.



Rodrigo was mainly in charge of the second section, which was to teach students Python and have them write code. Therefore, he started by instructing everyone to download Python. First, he taught them how to write Python code in a file and what to be careful about, and then he explained how to use basic code, such as conditional statements and loop actions by repetition.

The lesson also covers the algorithm for solving Sudoku puzzles. Sudoku is a puzzle in which the puzzle pieces are arranged in a 9x9 grid of 3x3 blocks, with no

duplicate numbers in either row or column, or in any 3x3 block. To solve this algorithm, you first need to understand the code to check for empty cells, the procedure to get the possible values for the cells, and the code to write the determined numbers on the board, and repeat this process until there are no more empty cells.



More than 1,700 people participated in the programming class, and excluding some disqualified students, '1,668 people' were officially recognized by Guinness. Below is a photo of Rodrigo holding his Guinness certificate after the lesson. Regarding his impressions of the class, Rodrigo said, 'It was a lot of fun to be able to teach about 1,750 students. I think I was able to show that you can already do something interesting, such as solving Sudoku after understanding some keywords and syntactic structures, but ideally I would have been able to give the students the impression that this is something complicated. I think most of the students already had some programming experience. I hope I didn't scare the students who didn't have programming experience.'



'Computer literacy today is almost the same as it was 100 years ago,' said Rogério Colaco, professor of engineering and rector of the Lisbon Higher Technical University, explaining the purpose of the project: 'Computer literacy today is almost the same as it was 100 years ago. I believe that to survive in modern society, everyone needs to know a little about computer science and programming. Through this project and other initiatives, we aim to draw international attention to Portugal as a growth hub for information technology and to promote the widespread use of computing.'

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