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Programming competitions for middle and high school students have a long tradition in Hungary, the first national competition dates back to 1985, and our country has been participating in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) from the very beginning. This paper presents the current situation and challenges of Hungarian nationwide programming contests, national team selection, and training system.

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Engagement of students plays a crucial part in education, even if they are gifted children. We know a success story: the extracurricular mathematics camps of Lajos Pósa for talented teenagers in Hungary. The key to that success is the excellently engineered network of problems that guide students through discovering the world of higher level mathematics. It would be a novel approach to teach computer programming and algorithms in a similar way. In this paper we attempt to design a network of problems selected specifically for discovery learning of algorithms and data structures from beginner to advanced level, targeted for secondary and high school talented students. This could serve as the curriculum for extra classes or camps conducted with the problem-based teaching method we describe.

In most programming languages, the built-in (standard library) sort() function is the most convenient and efficient way for ordering data. Many software engineers have forgotten (or never knew) the underlying algorithms. In programming contests, almost all of the tasks involving sorting can be solved with only knowing how to use the sort() function. The question might arise in young students: do we need to know how it works if we only need to use it? Also, why should we know multiple efficient sorting algorithms, is not one enough? In this paper, we help the teachers to give the best answers to these questions: some beautiful tasks where the key to the solution lies in knowing a particular sorting algorithm. In some cases, the sorting algorithms are applied as a surprisingly nice idea, for example, in an interactive task or a geometry question.