Perspectives on Computer Science Competitions
for (High School) Students

Date

January 22-27, 2006

Place

Schloss Dagstuhl International Conference and Research Center for Computer Science, Germany

Background

On an international level, but also in many countries in the world, computer science competitions for (high school) students are organized according to the example of the IOI (International Olympiad in Informatics). In recent years, this "IOI-alike" contest model has developed towards and focused on algorithmic programming tasks with purely automatic grading. This focus similarly holds for the most important college student contest, the ACM ICPC (International Collegiate Programming Contest). While this model has great advantages, namely objectivity in grading, there are drawbacks, too: Small mistakes may lead to zero scores, faulty solutions may achieve full scores, if they luckily fit the test cases. Furthermore, IOI- and ACM-alike contests cover only a limited aspect of computer science, which has a negative impact on the relevance and importance of such contests.

Goal

The main goal of this workshop is to provide an effective forum for discussing both different possible approaches to organizing computer science contests and potential directions of development for IOI and ACM-alike contests. Furthermore, workshop participants are required to produce concrete proposals for the (short-term, mid-term, and long-term) future development of IOI- and ACM-alike contests, which shall be presented to their home communities for discussion. Last but not least, this workshop may initiate the establishment of the area of computer science contests as a scientific field.

Participation and Submissions

Participants will be selected based on their submission of papers on research related to computer science contests or of short papers that contain sketches of (interesting and promising) ideas. Participation will be limited to about 20 persons. All submissions and the resulting proposals will be published in (electronic) workshop proceedings, while elaborated and high quality papers shall be published in a journal.

Submission Procedure

Submit your contribution as a PDF document until October 31, 2005, via e-mail to pohl at bwinf dot de (Wolfgang Pohl).

Deadlines and Dates

Remarks

Participants will have to cover their cost of traveling to Dagstuhl and pay 60 Euro (single room) or 45 Euro (double room) per person per night for full accommodation and meals. However, there will be some support funds available; accepted participants may apply for financial support.

Organization and Program Committee

Ben Burton, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
Gordon Cormack, University of Waterloo, Canada
Martins Opmanis, University of Latvia, Latvia
Wolfgang Pohl, National Computer Science Contest, Germany (contact person, see "Submission Procedure")
Tom Verhoeff, Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands