AUBURN — “Dungeon 1.0” is inspired by puzzles. “The Adventures of Bob” involves finding keys and moving through doors.

These coding projects by Edward Little High School students won first and second places in an international competition.

Freshman Quinn Donahue’s “Dungeon” came in first in the “unrestricted/open” category. Junior Peter Hansen’s “Bob” took second place in the same category in the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Academy Spring 2020 International Creative Task Competition.

The open category “is often the most competitive,” EL computer science teacher Eric Eisaman said.

“It is a joy to work with (Donahue and Hansen) as they journey through their studies,” he said. “I am very moved and encouraged by the high level of technical proficiency exhibited in their contest submissions.”

The Carnegie Mellon University curriculum offers online  instruction in programming skills using graphics and animation, according to its website.

The program is designed to fill the gap between K-8 introductory classes and the Advanced Placement courses offered in high school.

“This isn’t ‘drag and drop’ programming,” according to David Kosbie, an associate professor and co-director of the university’s School of Science’s new Computer Science Academy.

“We’re teaching them to use Python, a text-based programming language that is the most widely taught language at the university level,” Kosbie said.

Python is “essentially a canvas to put things on,” said Donahue, who will be a sophomore in the fall. It allows programmers to create a backdrop and to add pieces by telling the computer what they want, he said.

“Draw a rectangle over here and when the little player guy is inside the rectangle, tell him to do a certain thing,” Donahue said.

He said the game is based on “little puzzles that I play. I wanted to see how far I could take it, so I just made it for my schoolwork as part of the programming class. In this case, you move the character around using the arrow keys on your computer.”

He created the program after schools closed March 16 to limit the spread of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

He and Hansen were a couple of months into the class with Eisaman when schools closed, Donahue said.

He said he wasn’t expecting to win the competition.

“A lot of people do this thing,” he said. “’Unrestricted’ is basically everything they were teaching. I was really excited. It was crazy.”

The Carnegie Mellon University CS Academy provides free curriculum to more than 1,000 schools and 25,000 students, according to CS4ALL, an initiative to empower all U.S. students to learn computer science.

Hansen, who will be a senior in the fall, said his “Bob” project was the result of experimenting with the development process of coding a video game.

“It was an engaging way to apply what I had learned in class,” he said. “In my free time during the class (Intro to Programming in Python), I would work on it.”

The game he created “is about collecting keys and going through doors,” he said. “There is really no point to it. I just built it to have fun.”

Winning second place was a surprise, he said, though he learned a lot from Eisaman this past school year.

“My Python class showed me that coding is something that I like, and learning new ways to create games is fun and rewarding.”

Hansen said he began the project on his own.

“I wanted to make something that more resembled a game than what we were working on in class,” he said. “Mr. Eisaman encouraged me to work on this and has always been supportive of me working on game development (on my own time,” Hansen said.

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