Programming Competitions

Darkphenom

Hi all,

Are there any programming competitions coming up next year for students in secondary schools?

I entered into a scratch competition already and found it was a great way to focus on learning a new way to make programs.

Skrynesaver

take a look at Project Euler it is an interesting series of maths and programming challenges that should provide you with some new programming chalanges (and improve your maths )

NeverSayDie

Microsoft's Imagine Cup might be of interest, I think it's open to secondary school folks (over 16 anyway), not 100% on that though - it's mostly university folks who enter.
http://www.imaginecup.com/about

Likewise for game development, they run a DreamBuildPlay competition that's pretty popular;
http://www.dreambuildplay.com/main/default.aspx

lil_lisa

I did a lot of these in my spare time, would love to go back and get a team together for it:

http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~ioiprog/

I believe they build up a team for the following:

http://www.ioinformatics.org/index.shtml

techguy

Check out robocode.ie

There are secondary and third level competitions.. great day out!

I was on the winning team for colleges in '08

fergalr

Topcoder.com is always running programming competitions.
Its a great environment for practising with, too. Its got a large archive of previous competitions, complete with automated correctness evaluation.

When I was in college, and even after, we did the BCS programming competition several times - but they seem to have stopped running it.

If you are in college, there's always http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACM_International_Collegiate_Programming_Contest which is very well regarded internationally - but I'm not sure how you qualify for that.

Should also mention, if you are into games programming, http://www.ludumdare.com/ Ludum Dare runs from time to time, and is always great fun.

Kidchameleon

A bit late for this now but:

http://code.google.com/codejam/

There's past questions on there too...

Darkphenom

I dont know any programming language as such although I have used scratch. Would you recommend python or c for competitions (eg. google jam)

fergalr

Darkphenom wrote: »

I dont know any programming language as such although I have used scratch. Would you recommend python or c for competitions (eg. google jam)

The best language depends on what the exact situation, rules and questions are.
Some languages will have better support for particular kinds of operation. For example, if you get some questions easily solved by elementary bit manipulations on characters, C might be the best choice. Or maybe the question requires arbitrary precision arithmetic, which java maybe has the best built in library for, etc.

That said, in general, if you are asking for a choice between C and Python, I'd definitely go for python. The standard library is much more powerful, and its, in general, much quicker to code in. Speed of implementation is very important.

But, before trying to do programming competitions, you should set out to learn your programming language of choice, with the goal of learning it well in mind.