Errichto's blog

By Errichto, 4 years ago, In English

Let's discuss the idea of IOI preparation in form of weekly contests and classes.

Many programming camps reuse problems from old national camps and contests. What about doing this on a bigger scale and conducting weekly mashup contests open for everybody for free? The problem analysis would be in English, in written or (live) video format, possibly combined with a lecture. Make a discord server for further discussion and questions, encourage students to upsolve, maintain yearly leaderboard and upsolving leaderboard. Once or twice a year, call it a 1-week online camp and organize these mashup contests daily.

I can take part in this initiative but I want to be just one of many teachers. When it's my turn, I would pick some old interesting POI or ONTAK problems because I either know them or can look up the solution in Polish. If I do this once per 1-2 months, I won't run out of good problems anytime soon, and I have enough time to prepare analysis and lecture, and later spend several hours just helping people with doubts and wrong codes. I can oversee this project at the beginning but then I'd prefer somebody else to take over.

Why?

There's clearly a need for IOI training. Almost every month, some country asks me if I can teach their IOI team by conducting a camp or mentoring them for a longer period. Even if a country has strong teachers or former participants, that usually just means one camp a year or classes for a single school. In my opinion, it's very important to train regularly, compete with others, and be able to ask questions. You can now participate regularly in Codechef Lunchtime or COCI but those are rare and neither of them emulates the camp experience.

Div2

If there are enough good subtasks, hard problems aren't a big issue for weak participants because they still have something to do and learn. Still, maybe once a month the contest should be just much easier to encourage everybody to participate? Or always add one more easy problem and recommend strong participants to skip it?

Codechef

I first thought that every contest should happen on its native platform like Szkopul for POI problems. It's easy to conduct such a contest made of old problems but the rules would be inconsistent and participants would need to create many accounts. A seemingly independent issue is money.

I then talked with Codechef and they agreed to pay teachers if it's all conducted on Codechef platform. Keeping track of everything would be much easier. Codechef staff will take care of adjusting the problem package format to the Codechef system but obviously, some problems might become unusable. (I think that CodeChef Lunchtime should then become part of this project too.)

By the way, you could find teachers who can work for free (like CSPrep by geniucos) but this is a time-consuming job, including the translation and helping students by answering their questions. Usually, camps exist because participants pay a fee or it's sponsored by a ministry of education, etc. I think that CodeChef is a good solution here. Nothing is decided yet so let me know if you disagree!

Possible Issues

  1. Copyrights — Not every platform or old contest will allow reusing their problems in a different platform.
  2. Language barrier — Some high school students don't know English well enough. From my teaching experience, strong participants usually don't have troubles, but weaker ones often prefer to resolve small doubts with a teacher or assistant who speaks their native language.
  3. Timezones and collisions — We need a USACO-style long time window (it's supported by Codechef!) so you could choose when to start a 5-hour contest. If analysis or lecture is in live video format, it will still be tricky to find a 2-hour slot on Saturday or Sunday without collisions with regular contests. If somebody misses a live-stream, they should still be able to rewatch it and ask questions.
  4. Quality — Just like for any camp, experienced teachers are necessary to ensure the quality of problems and analysis.

Please share your thoughts and suggestions!

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4 years ago, # |
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    4 years ago, # ^ |
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    Why are you so against Codechef?

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      4 years ago, # ^ |
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      Because Codechef has now been acquired by UnAcademy which forces the coders to buy the courses in very high price. It should be always open ended and free community giveaway..

      Errichto Please do it on codeforces it will certainly target mass coders.Thanks

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        4 years ago, # ^ |
        Rev. 5   Vote: I like it +41 Vote: I do not like it

        Though it is true that it got acquired by Unacademy :(

        But everything which was free earlier is still free and they never forced anyone to buy their courses. You can just assume the Unacademy isn't there and everything is same as ususal. Additionally, just see the number of videos related to cp they've been uploading on YT after Unacademy. I've not taken their courses because they are costly but for me nothing has changed on codechef.

        You just need to be smart enough to know what to take and what not.

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4 years ago, # |
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It would be amazing if such initiative is taken for ICPC too.

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    4 years ago, # ^ |
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    A wise man once said.
    Train a kid for IOI. He will give you ICPC medals after few years.

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      4 years ago, # ^ |
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      sometimes you give me hope, sometimes just disappointment in myself :(

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4 years ago, # |
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Great idea, most platforms with frequent contests are mainly focused on an 1:30-2:00 hour contest, so it would be nice to get something closer to IOI.

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4 years ago, # |
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Is there any update on this project?

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4 years ago, # |
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Codeforces is Best site ever made. I used it like 10 years starting from childhood. Thanks for all creators of this fantastic Website and to everyone who is reading this now !!Happy New Year!!I Wish all of you to solve problems (lvl higher than 3000) and reach Nutella this coming year :)

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4 years ago, # |
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I will conduct the first training sometime in January. Please write to me if you want to teach too (and have some experience).

Btw. it's pretty sad that most discussion that happened here (in deleted comments) and in discord or priv was "codechef bad xd" instead of issues I raised in the blog or just any suggestions. But something meaningful I learned is that employees of big companies like Facebook or Google can't be paid for this, so they will be less incentivized to conduct a training. On the bright side, many people are interested in participating :)

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4 years ago, # |
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I think that this is an absolutely great initiative.... I would myself had partcipated as a teacher had I been really good in this field and had experience. Still, I support this idea from the perspective of being an Indian where IOI really is still in shadows. And not everyone might feel motivated without a formal training for IOI . Hope the IOI guys from India come forward and advance this initiative further.

Also, I would like to make a point that you can keep it that way that the students who are sincere towards IOI should only be in this. May be if certain students are not taking part sincerely, u should exclude them.

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    4 years ago, # ^ |
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    are you serious for everything you said ? I am confused if your account is troll account or genuine .

    UPD : I talked to The_mysterio personally and i think he is genuine . Just he is very nice (which is unusual these days) so i was little confused .

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4 years ago, # |
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any updates ?