To hold a student programming contest: our experience

It so happened that in our region and our industry (web development) our studio is in the lead for many years in a row. This is not at all written for wit, it’s just that this position imposes a certain responsibility: those young guys who want to work on the web need to be helped to express themselves.

And at the same time there is a natural practical interest - when the studio grows, it becomes necessary to have more hands and heads, and these guys could become them. Of course, if you want to, we do not force anyone.
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We have quite a sober realization that in Barnaul there are simply no fully prepared specialists of the level we need. Rather, they are, but everyone is already working somewhere. Therefore, one of the reasons to hold the Olympiad is to reveal free bright minds.

Problems

At least two major problems prevent the web as a branch from developing:

First, global. Those who are trained in IT specialties often do not have normal applied knowledge given by teachers. Many current PHP developers are self-taught.

The second is local. It is called "the problem of rare frames in a small town." Many run away from the city, others - work in the desks where it is difficult to unlock the potential, but still remain seated exactly (because there is no place to go).

Now - to the goals arising from here.

Goals

1. To stimulate the industry as a whole, to force young programmers to look towards the web, to create a positive halo.
2. Find those who want to develop in this direction, offer them the opportunity to gain practical skills.

Base

By the time when we decided for ourselves to expand the activity that would help to achieve these goals, we already had the experience of “growing” developers from completely green and inexperienced. This practice was dictated, again by the “problem of a small town” - they took the novice, included him in the team of experienced developers (we have Scrum), gradually increased the complexity of the tasks given to him.

Idea

From all goal-setting a logical solution appeared: to hold a student web programming contest. Intercollegiate, without strict requirements for participants - it can be any student or schoolchild.

I’ll say right away that the Olympiad has already been held twice, in 2013 and 2014, so the report on how this was done will be “combined” of these two experiments.

So, what was done during the preparation for the Olympiad:

• We contacted a familiar progressive teacher from the state university (he oversees the local IT center). He really helped to circumvent the various "subtleties" of the education system.
• Together we planned how we will deliver the information to the students. Working with teachers, by the way, could bring both invaluable benefits and fair hemorrhoids (as it turned out, not all teachers see in such events a benefit for themselves and can easily become a hindrance).
• We decided on the time of the Olympiad: it will be March-April. The time of sessions and defenses has not yet come, many are determined with the place of practice.
• Developed the concept of the Olympiad: there will be two rounds - correspondence (site competition, you need to develop and show a site with a story about yourself) and full-time (solving algorithmic problems in any familiar language). Thus, the strongest were revealed both by “intelligence and wit”, and by training precisely in web development.
• They came up with a name - Hot Code (which is funny, in a couple of months a conference with the same name will be held in Kiev). They made leaflets to attract attention in the walls of the university and launched the promo website of the Olympiad, with the registration form.
• They allocated a place on their hosting for the sites of the contestants - everyone who wished to take part was given access.
  Planned a publication plan in local media. From the side of the university, a PR service has joined - spreading information about the Olympiad in social networks.

The car was started, at first we had only to accept competitive sites (by the way, there was a couple of almost professional ones that pleased us all).

The next round is problem solving. To whom it is interesting, you can decide, here is one of the examples;)

Minefield

The flat playing field is divided into adjacent cells (squares), some of which are “mined”; the number of “mined” cells is known. The goal of the game is to open all the cells that do not contain mines.

The player opens the cells, trying not to open the cell with a mine. Opening a cell with a mine, he loses.

Mines are placed from a pre-prepared file. If there is no mine under the open cell, then a number appears in it, indicating how many cells adjacent to the just opened one are “mined”. If there are no mines under the neighboring cells too, then a certain “non-mined” area opens up to cells that contain numbers. Having opened all the “non-mined” cells, the player wins.

Input file [input.txt]

The input file in the first line contains two numbers, M - width, N - height, separated by a space (maximum 50 50). Next is M lines. Each line contains N characters. Symbols can be 0 (no mines) and 1 (mined).

[output.txt]

five	five
0	0	0	0	0
one	0	0	0	one
0	one	0	one	0
0	one	one	0	0
one	one	0	one	one

Speaking of prizes. Olympics, of course, not on the bare enthusiasm:



In addition to material values, we offered to undergo an internship in the studio. So a year ago, in 2013, we invited 8 students, four of them agreed, three of them were enrolled in the staff and are still working.



Fully justifying expectations statistics.

Now

At the moment, the winners of 2014 have been awarded, invitations have been sent - we are waiting for a meeting with new Padawans. And the experience is quite good, if you decide to conduct - specify what is interesting, we will try to tell.