Charis02's blog

By Charis02, 3 years ago, In English

Introduction

I am writing this blog to get everyone's opinion on attracting more contestants and keeping them engaged to my country's (Cyprus) OI. These are questions asked by me, a participant, not the organizers of the olympiad.

Team Selection Contests

Our team selection is composed of 3 rounds (100 points problems, with subtasks, full feedback, no penalty, no live ranking).

  • The first round is a 5-hour contest of 4 problems (mainly implementation problems, codeforces DIV2B difficulty is the hardest). 200 points or greater lets you proceed to the next round
  • The second round is a 5-hour contest of 4 problems (focused on basic graph problems, easy do, binary search, and ad-hoc problems). The top 16 contestants proceed to the next round
  • The third round is 2 days of 5-hour contests, of 3 problems each (harder graph and do problems, problems using segment tree/other data structures, hard ad-hoc problems, strings, maths, usually the problems' difficulty is IOI easy-medium but can be easier). The top 4 contestants make the team that participates in IOI

Lessons

The 20 (free) 90-minute lessons provided by the organizers cover:

  • Introduction to C++
  • Basic Algorithms (sortings, binary search)
  • Basic Graph Algorithms (dfs,bfs, SSSP, MST)
  • Classic DP problems (Knapsack, Coin Change, LCS, LIS)

Every year there is a spring 3-day camp organized, that covers more advanced material (Segment Trees, DP problems, Tree Queries, String Searching problems)

Communication

The organizers have set up:

  • An official discord group for the community
  • A well-maintained website with lots of material for studying.
  • An online judge with past contest problems and problems from other sources.

Suggestions?

  • What do you think our organizers should do differently or do extra, to attract and keep more contestants, while also preparing them for the olympiads?
  • How many contestants leave after the first few lessons? How many give up after the first round? What do you do to keep them engaged?
  • How do you advertise your olympiad to reach your target audience?
  • Any other general suggestions for growing the community?

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