How to teach computer programming if our goal is the International Olympiad in Informatics

Abstract

Nowadays if a student in Hungary (age between 17-20 years old) wants to be the member of the Hungarian selected team (has four members) to participate in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), first, he has to qualify himself in the first fifteen of the National Secondary School Competition (OKTV) in the programming category after the III. round. Then he should be in the first four place after the sixth round of the Selection Competition. Being successful is necessary that the student wants to start studying computer programming at least in the 9 th school year and he needs a teacher who prepares him. In the last nine years three students of the author have participated in five Olympics and two of them won gold and bronze medals. This article wants to demonstrate the methods that a teacher needs to use to teach students in 9 th school year for computer programming, to be the member of the Hungarian National Team after three or four years.

A Problem-based Curriculum for Algorithmic Programming

“…There are numerous similar articles, especially about the topic of how to prepare students for competitions. Király [18] describes a whole roadmap of teaching programming from the very beginning to the preparations for the IOI, together with proper pedagogical guidelines and useful advice. In her doctoral dissertation, Erdősné [19] provides a detailed insight into Hungarian and international talent education in informatics, also outlining a plan of teaching advanced level programming throughout secondary school.…”

“…Both papers suggest teaching DP after recursion, Forišek [22] even gives a strategy to transform a top-down recursive solution to a bottom-up DP solution. Király [18] suggests that DP should be taught only after recursion and backtracking and greedy algorithms at an advanced stage of programming knowledge. Independently from the three mentioned authors, we selected very similar problems and almost the same order of them.…”

How to use our own program evaluation system to streamline teaching computer programming

“…The best way of preparation for the contests is solving the problems of the previous years of these or similar competitions. [2] Solving the problems that were in the final rounds of the competitions is not enough in itself since memory and execution limits are given for the tasks that invalidate suboptimal solutions in terms of efficiency. So to reach the maximal score, the optimal solution is required from the young programmer which also means his program is not allowed to exceed these limits.…”