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2017

4th Virginia Tech High School Programming Contest​

announcement

This year's contest was stretched over 2 days because of inclement weather in the NoVa area, where several of our teams are from. Overall, 95 teams (71 on Saturday and 24 on Sunday) from 25 high schools participated in our 4th Virginia Tech High School programming contest on Dec 9/10, 2017. The top team, Princeton HS - BenQ, solved 11 out of 12 problems! A total of 1,539 attempts were submitted (Saturday: 1,222; Sunday: 317), with 416 accepted runs (Saturday: 319; Sunday: 97). 90 out of 95 teams solved at least one problem, and 64 solved 4 or more.

Congratulations to the following teams:​

  1. Place: Princeton HS - BenQ (Princeton HS): Benjamin Qi
  2. Place: A-Star - Air (AlphaStar Academy): Joel Manning, Eric Zhang, Stan Zhang
  3. Place: A-Star - Earth (AlphaStar Academy): Anne Ouyang, Riya Arora, Daniel Zhang

Contest Description

Organization​

After our successful HS Programming Contests held in 2014, 2015, and ** 2016,**, we are excited to invite teams to this year's contest. As in past years, 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 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 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 2014-2016 are now available on Kattis! (2014, 2015, 2016). 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.

Details​

When​

Sat, Dec 9, 2017. 11:00am-5pm EST.

Where​

All Online

Contact/Registration​

Registration is closed.

Schedule​

Regulation​

Rules​

  • Allowed languages are: Java, Python 2, Python 3, C, C++, Go, Scala, Racket, Ruby, and Haskell.
  • There will be an original problem set with 8-12 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​