STEM & Coding Olympiad Grand Final Rome 2026: Kodland student wins Gold and Silver
What consistent progress over three years looks like
Cartsen Ignacio Sarmiento was already into programming when he joined Kodland in 2023. In 2025 he won Gold at the Coding Olympiad Grand Final in Barcelona. In July 2026 he came back from Rome with two medals.
In July 2026, a student stood on the podium at the Coding Olympiad Grand Final in Rome — in front of competitors from 54 countries. He had been here before — not this stage, but this moment. A year earlier, he stood on a podium in Barcelona with a gold medal. Now he was back, in Rome, with two.
His name is Cartsen Ignacio Sarmiento. He joined Kodland in 2023, already drawn to coding. Three years later, he is competing at the highest level of an international programming olympiad and winning.
What the International STEM & Coding Olympiad is
The International STEM & Coding Olympiad is organized by Main Team Organization (MTO), an educational organization founded in 2012 and based in Germany and the United States. Every year it runs a global competition for students from grades 3 to 11, passing through online qualification rounds before a Grand Final held in a different city each year.
The 2026 Grand Final took place July 2–8 at the Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma in Rome, Italy. More than 700 students attended in person from 54 countries — the final stage of a competition that drew over 20,000 students from 184 countries throughout the year.
This is not a casual quiz. To reach the Grand Final, students pass multiple rounds of online examinations. Those who make it to Rome are among the best young programmers in the world.
Two categories. Two medals.
Cartsen competed in two tracks at the Grand Final.
The first was CodeCombat Arena Battles — one of the most demanding formats in the competition. Students write Python or JavaScript code that controls game characters in live head-to-head battles. Your code competes directly against another student's code. Wins are determined by how well your algorithm performs under pressure, in real time, against a real opponent. Cartsen won the Gold Medal.
The second was Challenges by Codementum (Grade 9–11): 30 programming tasks, 60 minutes, Python and JavaScript. No preparation shortcuts. Just the ability to read a problem, think fast, and write code that works. Cartsen won the Silver Medal.
Both formats reward the same underlying skill: the ability to write clean, logical code quickly and correctly. That is not a talent you are born with. It is something you build, lesson by lesson.
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From Barcelona to Rome: what three years of learning produces
Cartsen joined Kodland in 2023 — already into coding, looking for the right place to develop further. In 2025 he won Gold at the Coding Olympiad Grand Final in Barcelona. In 2026 he qualified again, travelled to Rome, and came back with two medals across two categories.
The skills that made that possible are built over time through consistent practice. Kodland's Python Start course (ages 10+) develops the foundations that competition-level coding demands: loops, functions, data structures, conditional logic — the building blocks that become real algorithms. Python PRO (ages 13+) takes that further into applied programming, data analysis, and AI, finishing with a full hackathon: a real problem, a time limit, a solution to present. That format — problem, clock, code — is exactly what CodeCombat Arena and Codementum demand.
Cartsen brought his own passion and drive. Kodland was where he chose to build his skills.
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