Two Jefferson City High School students will travel out of state in a couple of weeks to speak in code and compete with the TSA - but no, Elijah Hilty and Will Scully are not secret agents, though Scully said his dream job would be to work for the military.
The TSA is the Technology Student Association - not the Transportation Security Administration, at least when it comes to a national coding competition June 22-25 in Atlanta, Georgia, where Hilty and Scully will compete.
The TSA club at JCHS is at the end of its first full year of existence.
"You can basically do anything you want with coding. You can make apps, you can make stuff to basically have fun in life," Scully, a rising junior said of why computer programming appeals to him.
He said he's made websites with pictures for his mom's and grandma's birthdays before, and learning how to make websites got him interested in coding around eighth grade.
Hilty, a rising senior, said his interest started when he was about 5 years old, when he got a book on Ruby - a specific kind of programming language.
"I don't even touch that language anymore," he said. However, then he got interested in Minecraft.
He likes the creative aspect of coding, adding it's not like solving a math problem.
"One part of the skill is knowing all the syntex and knowing all the technical stuff. Another part of the skill is learning how to think creatively," he said, adding: "You really don't need to know that much about coding to develop that kind of skill."
He said it helps to expose himself to "really elegant ideas" that don't necessarily have to be in coding but could be theories in any area of study.
At a competition, they work at a computer and have a time limit to create a program that will perform a specific function, Hilty and Scully explained.
"You had to do it there on the spot, just code and talk through it, type," Scully explained of state competition - having won at Rolla to advance to nationals.
At state they had to write a program that could find the least common multiple of two numbers, Hilty said, adding their score was determined by many coding problems they solved and how long their code was.
He said he'd like to teach high school or college-level math or computer science for his career.
Scully said talking with a military recruiter at school gave him the idea of exploring that career route in coding. He isn't partial to any particular military branch yet.