Do you like challenges? Do you want to show off your programming skills? Do you have friends who like the same? How about spending four hours with your friends, programming, and competing with students in your school and other schools? Would not that be fun? Join this national programming challenge. Winning a national challenge could be helpful when it is time to apply for college and secure scholarships.
CodeforAwhile Team Programming Challenge 2023 is a programming competition for high school students hosted by the School of Computing at the University of North Florida (UNF). Below, we provide detailed information about the competition and how you can participate.
Introduction
Modeled after the global programming contests such as the ACM ICPC and the IEEE Xtreme contests, this competition will allow high school students to showcase their programming and problem-solving capabilities. The problems the contestants will solve have been carefully handpicked at a level suitable for high school students who may be new to programming and problem-solving. CodeforAwhile 2023 competition will be held on March 4 from 9 AM to 1 PM as a virtual competition using the DOMjudge system hosted by UNF.
How to Participate
Teachers from the high school that wish to coordinate their students’ participation in the competition are highly encouraged to register teams of two or three students from grades 9 through 12. Students are not allowed to register themselves. Students are expected to coordinate with a teacher to register their teams. There can be multiple teams from one school. The name and gender information for each team member should be included when registering a team. The coordinating teachers must register the participating teams on or before March 1, 2023, at 5 PM by visiting below link.
Eventbrite CodeforAwhile Registration
This competition is offered free of charge.
The Competition Schedule
9 AM to 9:45 AM - Practice Session
10 AM to 1 PM - Main Competition
Winners of the programming challenge would be announced a few days after the event. Solutions submitted will be reviewed for plagiarism or other forms of cheating before declaring competition winners. Any form of cheating would disqualify the team from consideration for award winners.
Rules and Procedures
- Around 8 problems will be posted at the beginning of the competition.
- The teams will be given three hours to solve the problems.
- The participants may use personal devices or computers available at their schools.
- Teams may choose to work the problems in any order.
- The competition will be using DOMjudge, a platform for running programming contests. Teams can get familiar with the competition features of the DOMjudge system by trying out the online demo available at https://www.domjudge.org/demoweb/team using username as team and password as team.
- For more information on using the DOMjudge system, you may visit www.domjudge.org/docs/team-manual.pdf
- The teams must not run programs that are designed to degrade the performance of the system maliciously or to disturb the work of other teams.
- The members of each team may not discuss the problems of the competition with anybody except their team members.
Awards and Prizes
The top three teams will receive prize awards from VyStar Credit Union.
The first-place team will receive $1000, the second-place team will receive $500, and the third-place team will receive $250.
A teacher who registers the highest number of teams (and those teams solve a minimum of 2 problems) will receive a special award.
Each winning team participant will receive an award certificate.
FAQs
Do the team members have to be in high school to compete?
Yes. This competition is designed for high school students learning computer programming, including AP Computer Science, informatics, software development, cybersecurity, information technology, or other computing-related subjects. The problems the teams will face are at the difficulty level to match the range of abilities of students 14 to 18 years of age who have computer programming education ranging from 6 months to two years.
Do the teams have to be in Florida to compete?
No, not at all! Since this competition is held online, we welcome all teams whose members are currently in high school in the United States of America!
Can teams consisting of members who don’t take computer programming classes at school participate?
Yes. However, the coordinating teacher should still provide complete team and school information at the time of registration.
Where can I find practice problems?
We recommend practicing programming problems archived by the Kattis system at https://open.kattis.com/.
How many problems will there be?
You will be working on around 8 problems of varying difficulty.
Do I have to work on the problems in order?
No. you certainly do not!
You may work on the problems in any order.
Note that the problems could vary quite widely in level of difficulty.
What is DOMjudge?
DOMjudge is an automated judge system to run programming contests. It has a mechanism to submit problem solutions, have them judged fully automatically, and post clarification questions to contest organizers.
How does scoring work?
Teams are ranked by the number of questions they have solved. If multiple teams have answered the same number of questions, then they are ranked by a point system based on the least total time to submit a correct solution for the questions and the fewest attempts to get the correct solution.
How do I obtain access to my DOMjudge account credentials?
Programming contest organizers would email the DOMjudge access URL and your login information a few hours before the start of the contest on March 4, 2023.