Westwood High School’s Computer Science Club has been named the winner of a nationwide high school competition hosted by Spike, an investing platform founded by Harvard University students.
More than 400 students across the country participated in the competition, which provided competitors with 10,000 digital tokens to use in simulated trades on short-form video content. Westwood earned the top score among all participating schools.
Senior Victor L. said the competition challenged students to analyze digital trends and predict how videos would perform.
“It was essentially a prediction market competition where we beta tested the app and made predictions on how many views certain short-form videos like TikToks will get,” Victor said. “We looked at both the numbers, like how views have changed over time, and the videos themselves, because certain genres might perform better. We tried to predict how the algorithm would treat them.”
Victor said students used a variety of data points and team discussion to guide their strategies.
“We had to choose if a video would reach a certain view count in a certain amount of time, and we used all these different types of analysis to help our predictions,” he said.
About 30 students participated, collaborating both independently and in groups.
“We mostly worked alone, but we were able to share strategies and brainstorm how we would choose which videos to test to help the group as a whole,” Victor said. “Even just participating in this contest helped us bond. We meet every week, so we’re a really tight-knit group. It was really fun for us.”
Spike co-founder and Harvard sophomore Abbi Park visited Westwood earlier in the month with her team to surprise the club with a ceremonial check during lunch. Park said Westwood’s performance stood out throughout the competition.
“We saw Westwood’s name on the leaderboard for weeks on end,” she said. “We were especially impressed with Victor, who traded ahead of top minds at Stanford and Harvard by something like 700%. That’s unheard of.”
Victor said meeting the Spike team was a highlight of the experience.
“It was really cool to see that they flew out. They were really nice,” he said. “No matter whether we won or lost, our members gained valuable experience beta testing an app and seeing how apps have to be used by real people before they can launch. They actually launched their app the day they came to give us the check, so it was really cool to see that process.”
This national recognition highlights the club’s dedication to computer science, collaboration and innovation.