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2025 Contest

Results​

The 12th Virginia Tech High School Programming Contest (VTHSPC) contest has now concluded.

We determined the winners to be

  1. Place: "Do you like hacks?" - Nelson Huang (NCSSM), Jason Sun (Newport HS), Yujia Gong (Basis Independent McLean)

  2. Place: "FishyFunctions" - Connor Chang, David Mao (North Allegheny HS), Vincent Loh (Winchester Thurston HS)

  3. Place: "rusty" - Satej Gandre, Ajay Balusu, Rushil Ramkumar (Independence HS)

We disqualified 5 teams for violating the contest rules, in particular related to the use of AI. The final scoreboard is viewable on Kattis.

Thanks to the VT students enrolled in CS2144/4144 for setting the problems for the contest and helping judging.

Thanks to the Kattis team for sponsoring it by providing access to their platform!

Organization​

Anyone enrolled in a high school (or middle school) is eligible to participate however, you will need a teacher or volunteer (can be a parent) functioning as the official team coach or sponsor. Please see below for details of the rules.

Please share this event with your friends and colleagues at other schools! Capacity permitting, this event is open to all high schools in the United States and possibly beyond, although we hope to particularly attract schools from the midatlantic region.

Registration​

Based on the feedback we have received from coaches and contestants, we will hold this year's contest using the traditional format of an ICPC contest, with teams of (up to) 3 students to solve as many problems as possible within 5 hours.

A coach needs to register each team. We ask that the coach is also the person that can testify that the team obeyed the contest rules.

👉 use this Google form to register.

We anticipate that there will be widely varying levels of skills and accordingly, the problems will require varying levels of skill. We will include problems that require only simple I/O, control structures such as if/else and/or loops, as well as problems that require basic algorithms. To skillfully participate in a contest such as this one, participants need to quickly triage problems and solve the easiest ones first.

All problems will involve reading input line by line from standard input, and outputting an answer to standard output. (No other file I/O is allowed.) Coaches should make sure that contestants are familiar with this style of I/O. This may require the use of java.util.Scanner or similar classes in Java or raw_input() or sys.stdin or similar in Python.

Practice

Past problem sets can be found on Kattis. You can practice problems individually, but you can also create a contest with these problems (if you haven't done them already).

Details​

When​

Sat, Jan 3, 2026. 11:00pm-5pm EST. Registration will close before the contest.

Where​

On Kattis. All Online, Remote.

The URL is going to be vthspc.kattis.com

Contact/Registration​

We require preregistration via the Google form. It is best if you already have a Kattis account you can provide when you register.

Schedule​

  • 11:00am Optional Practice Contest: URL (to be added)
  • 12:00pm Contest starts, problem set will appear online on the Kattis contest system
  • 12:00pm PDF will be available to coaches for printing
  • 5:00pm End of contest

Regulation​

Rules​

  • Allowed languages are the languages available on Kattis
  • There will be 1 original problem set with 8-12 problems of varying difficulty.
  • You may use one computer per team member. You must have the ability to locally edit, compile, and test your code.
  • You will be using a web site to submit your solutions's source code. We will be using the Kattis contest management system.
  • Contestants may not receive help from any human outside their team.
  • Contestants may not use generative AI assistance including CoPilot, ChatGPT, Bard, or comparable systems. For details, see Codeforces AI policy.
  • We'll disqualify contestants who, in our sole judgment, violated this policy.
  • The use of a printer, where available, is allowed and encouraged.
  • There is no sign-up fee.
  • There is no limit on the number of contestants a school can send.
  • Code that was written before the contest may be used. This is like at the ICPC regionals, where teams can bring prepared materials.

Requirements​

  • Internet Access

FAQ​