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2016

3rd Virginia Tech High School Programming Contest​

announcement

101 teams from 25 high schools participated in our 3rd Virginia Tech High School programming contest on Dec 10, 2016. The top team, TJHSST Make Programming Great Again, solved 10 out of 10 problems! A total of 1,200 attempts were submitted, with 430 accepted runs. 100 out of 101 teams solved at least one problem, and 56 solved 4 or more.

Congratulations to the following teams:​

  1. Place: TJHSST Make Programming Great Again (Thomas Jefferson High School S&T): Franklyn Wang, Shwetark Patel, and Justin Zhang
  2. Place: aStar - Air (AStar League): Anson Hu, Bryan Chen, Swapnil Garg
  3. Place: aStar - Earth (AStar League): Brandon Wang, Joel Manning, Michael Chen

Acknowledgements​

This contest was organized by Dr. Godmar Back (Contest Director and Head Judge), and volunteers from the Virginia Tech ACM ICPC Programming Team (on picture, left to right: Harrison Fang, Alyssa Herbst, Ethan Gallagher, Daniel Moyer, Andriy Katkov, Chris Wu, and Dr. Back). Additional problem setters and volunteers included Neha Kapur and Peter Steele. The organizers warmly thank Scott Pruett for developing and providing the excellent PCS 2.0 contest management successfully used in the contest.

We also thank the on-site coaches: Fatih Gelgi, Sharon McPherson, Laurence Crosswell, Joseph Palen, Brian Meermans, Linda Trochim, Ginny Listman, Kimberly Baram, Stephen Rose, Rodney Snyder, John Morrison, Marla Schnall, Jennifer Rountree, Rachelle Carlson, Yaroslav Mayewsky, and Eva Anderson.

For feedback, ideas, questions, etc. please email Dr. Godmar Back.

To be kept up to date about future contests, please join the vthscontest Google group.

Contest Description

Organization​

After our successful 1st and 2nd HS Programming Contests held in 2014 and 2015, we are excited to invite teams for a third year. Like last year's, this contest will be held online. Anyone enrolled in a high school is eligible to participate; however, you will need a teacher (or parent volunteer) functioning as the official team coach. 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, although we hope to particularly attract teams from the MidAtlantic region.

The contest will be in the style of the ACM ICPC contest, with teams of 3 students sharing a computer to solve as many problems as possible within 5 hours. A problem is judged by whether it produces the expected output for a given input within an allotted time limit.

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

The problem sets from 2014-2015 are now available on Kattis! (2014, 2015). You can practice problems individually, but you can also create a contest with these problems (if you haven't done them already). You can also find links to additional practice sites here.

Thanks to the support of the stack@cs center, we may be able to provide small prizes to the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd ranked teams.

Details​

When​

Sat, Dec 10, 2016. 10:00am-4pm.

Where​

All Online

Contact/Registration​

Registration is closed.

Schedule​

Regulation​

Rules​

  • Allowed languages are: Java, Python 2, Python 3, C, C++, Go, Scala, Racket, and Haskell.
  • There will be an original problem set with 8-10 problems of varying difficulty.
  • Teams of 3 sharing one computer, as in an ACM ICPC contest. 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 PCS contest management system we have built here at Virginia Tech. Teams can try it out here.
  • Teams may not receive help from any human outside their team. The on-site coach is trusted with ensuring that.
  • 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 ACM ICPC regionals, where teams can bring prepared materials.

Requirements​

  • Internet Access

FAQ​