oii-web: an Interactive Online Programming Contest Training System

2020

IOI

Self Cite

Programming contests such as International Olympiads in Informatics (IOI) and ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) are becoming increasingly popular in recent years. To train for these contests, there are several Online Judges available, in which users can test their skills against a usually large set of programming tasks. In the literature, so far few papers have addressed the problem of recommending tasks in online judges. Most notably, as opposed with traditional Recommender Systems, since the learners improve their skills as they solve more problems, there is an intrinsic dynamic dimension that has to be considered: when recommending movies or books, it is likely that the preferences of the users are more or less stable, whilst in recommending tasks this does not hold true. In order to help the learners, it is crucial to recommend them tasks that are challenging but not unsolvable compared with their current set of skills. In this paper we present a Recommender System (RS) for Online Judges based on an Autoencoder (Artificial) Neural Network (ANN). We also discuss the results of an experimental evaluation of our approach in both the scenarios in which we consider, or not, the intrinsic dynamic dimension of the problem. The ANNs are trained with the dataset of all the submissions in the Italian National Online Judge, used to train students for the Italian Olympiads in Informatics.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Spiegazionementioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Recommending Tasks in Online Judges using Autoencoder Neural Networks

Fantozzi¹,

2020

IOI

Self Cite

“…Since 2011, the Italian national phase has used the Contest Management System (CMS) (Maggiolo and Mascellani, 2012) as its platform to host the contest; CMS is also the core of the training platform available for students (di Luigi et al, 2016) and has been used also in team Olympiads (Amaroli et al, 2018). The contest is IOI-like: 5 hours and (usually) 3 problems to solve.…”

Section: Phase-3 (National)mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Italian Job: Moving (Massively) Online a National Olympiad

Audrito

Luigi

et al. 2021

IOI

Self Cite

The COVID-19 pandemic is having a pervasive effect worldwide, including local, national and international Olympiads in Informatics. Most national Olympiads had to be moved online, a process which poses a number of serious challenges. Help across countries is of uttermost importance in this context, to enable a successful continuation of the IOI during globally hard times. In this paper, we share the experience gained and tools produced during a year of online Olympiads in Italy, hoping that other countries can take profit of these (freely available) tools and suggestions for their own Olympiads.

“…Firstly, you can unofficially attend contests as a team or individually, to test your ability or get to know the competition: starting from the last year, we host an online mirror contest for this purpose. You can subscribe to the Italian training platform (Di Luigi et al, 2016) before the contests start at https://training.olinfo.it, and during each round you can solve the problems by submitting your solutions. The official and mirror contests have identical tasks, rules and platforms, with the sole exception of starting times: the mirror contest is held USACO-style, so that you can choose when to start your 3-hour time window during the 24 hours following the start of the official contest.…”

Section: How To Join the Iiotmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fostering Informatics Education through Teams Olympiad

Amaroli¹,

Audrito

Olympiads in Informatics

2018

Self Cite

Even though the International Olympiad in Informatics directly involves a restricted number of pupils from each country, one of its primary goals is stimulating interest in computer science and information technology over the whole younger segment of the world' s population. In several countries, this aim has to be accomplished without an active intervention of the Ministry of Education on school programs, relying on the efforts of small devoted organizations. In this context, promoting the involvement of a large number of school teachers may be as crucial as difficult to achieve. Following a 9-year experience of teams competitions in Italy, recently shared with other European countries, we argue that teams Olympiad may be an effective tool for widening the participation of high-school students and teachers, synergistically cooperating with existing individual competitions. On the one hand, teams contests foster peer education, encouraging talented students to help training fellows. On the other hand, these competitions can be more appealing both for average students, valuing group membership more than personal accomplishments, and most importantly, teachers: team achievements are more recognizably linked with the overall school or teacher performance than solitary excellences, resulting in increased returns rewarding the involved subjects.