Following the rules didn't help them. The rule was no templating tools that generate code. They didn't use that.
It simply seems like they had to deal with a school official who was too dumb to know what GitHub was and too egotistical to admit they might be wrong.
I actually dealt with something similar back in my high school days. I self-taught myself to program starting around age 10 or so. So by the time I was offered and took a "computer class" that had some programming in it in high school, I already knew what I was doing. Far better than the teacher in the class. Every project in the class I found very easy and did perfectly within the parameters requested, often time going way beyond the requirements. The teacher didn't like one bit that I was far exceeding her capabilities and the level expected and would find every excuse to mark me down. Her favorite excuse was to take issue with my comments (where I didn't explain every obvious line of code in verbose text). I barely passed the class.
After that, I changed my mind and decided I wouldn't study computer science in university, instead deciding to skip school altogether. Eventually did go to university after a gap year, but to study design instead. I was completely turned off from learning CS by this one teacher and it dramatically changed the course of life after. I did continue coding and ended up building some cool stuff, including a couple startups before switching to venture capital.
Hopefully for these kids it'll be a trigger for positive change too.
> Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files, such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit, are NOT permitted.
With Jekyll being there, I can only assume the intention was to mention GitHub Pages as an example, but as it is the rules clearly say using GitHub is NOT permitted. They could've questioned this discrepancy before the competition while reading the rules before starting, and at the very least just not mention using GitHub.
I'm not a web design professional, but they appear to have used it 3 ways-- 1) hosting and URL; 2) GitHub logo/branding on the footer and 3) back office collaboration tool.
I suspect it was uses #1 and #2 that generated the confusion, and while I am sympathetic to their feelings about the competition and DQ, I too might have been confused about whether they leveraged a "Wix-like" function to generate the page.
To you and me it seems obvious, but to someone less familiar the rules clearly say using Github is prohibited, even if it is for the wrong reasons. At that point you should either get clarification of the rules, or take the risk and end up in the situation OP is in now.
Reminds me of my cryptography class in college. Before taking the class I had written a peer to peer encrypted messaging tool for fun and to learn about encryption. It had its own handshake, custom RSA, AES, ephemeral messages, tooling to discover peers...
Anyway in the last year of my CS degree I had a class on encryption, got barely a passing grade on the exam. One of the questions I remember was "What color is the lock in the address bar of Google Chrome that indicates a website is encrypted?", there were a bunch of others like that.
It simply seems like they had to deal with a school official who was too dumb to know what GitHub was and too egotistical to admit they might be wrong.
I actually dealt with something similar back in my high school days. I self-taught myself to program starting around age 10 or so. So by the time I was offered and took a "computer class" that had some programming in it in high school, I already knew what I was doing. Far better than the teacher in the class. Every project in the class I found very easy and did perfectly within the parameters requested, often time going way beyond the requirements. The teacher didn't like one bit that I was far exceeding her capabilities and the level expected and would find every excuse to mark me down. Her favorite excuse was to take issue with my comments (where I didn't explain every obvious line of code in verbose text). I barely passed the class.
After that, I changed my mind and decided I wouldn't study computer science in university, instead deciding to skip school altogether. Eventually did go to university after a gap year, but to study design instead. I was completely turned off from learning CS by this one teacher and it dramatically changed the course of life after. I did continue coding and ended up building some cool stuff, including a couple startups before switching to venture capital.
Hopefully for these kids it'll be a trigger for positive change too.