Trinity University 2010 Regional High School Programming Competition

The Trinity University ACM student chapter invites all area schools to participate in our annual programming competition. The competition will be held on the Trinity campus on Saturday, April 10th. Team registration will be $45/team and teams are allowed to have 3 members on them. All competitors will be provided with a lunch and a T-shirt. In order to get a T-shirt we must have the team information, including shirt sizes, by March 25rd so we can order the shirts.

Rules/Details

The competition will be modeled after the ACM collegiate competitions where teams are given a set of problems to solve and all problems are of equal value. Part of the competition is for teams to figure out which problems are easiest. The teams will be ranked first by how many problems they solve correctly and then by how many penalty points they accrue on all the problems they solve correctly. Penalty points are given as follows, and as the name implies, you want fewer of them than your competition. When a problem is submitted correctly, the team gets one penalty point for every minute of time since the beginning of the competition. In addition, if that problem was submitted incorrectly, each incorrect submission will give the team an extra 10 points. Teams will only receive penalty points for problems that are answered correctly. Problems that are attempted, but never successful do not count against a team, but answering another problem correctly always boosts you because number solved counts more than penalty points. All problem input will come from standard input (System.in) and output should be printed to standard output (System.out).

To give you some idea of what problems might be like you can see the problems from previous years (2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009).

The competition will be done in the Java programming language and problem submission will be done electronically. If for some reason there is a problem with electronic submissions, disks will be provided to students and penalty points will be assigned based on the timestamp on the files. Each team will have one computer to work on that will be booted in Linux with Eclipse. Students will not need to know how to use Linux in order to compete. They will be provided with the a local copy of the javadocs and they can use any printed resource they wish to bring with them. No other computing devices or machine readable data will be allowed in the competition area.

Problems will be judged correct or incorrect based on the validity of the output they provide. In addition, programs that take longer than 1 minute to execute will be judged incorrect. The responses from the judges to the students will consist of either "Correct", "Incorrect", or "Timed Out".

The information handout that we will be providing to teams at the competition can also be seen in advance in this PDF.

You can also get the contest flyer with registration information.

Schedule

Time Activity Location
10:00-11:00 Registration and Welcome Northrup Hall (NH 040)
11:00-11:30 Practice Run Halsell and Cowles
11:30-12:30 Lunch Northrup Hall (NH 040)
12:30-3:30 Competition Halsell and Cowles
3:30-4:30 Awards Presentation Northrup Hall (NH 040)

Contact Information and Registration

If you have any questions about the competition or want to register a team to compete, write to mlewis@trinity.edu. While we hope that we can accommodate all of the teams who want to compete, slots will be given on a first come, first serve basis if we hit the limit of the number of teams we can accommodate. Also, we can only order T-shirts for teams that are officially registered by March 24th. Teams can register after that date, but we won't be able to give those teams shirts.

To register you can send school name, coach name, and number of teams to the e-mail address above. Checks made out to "Trinity ACM" should be sent to the following address and make sure to include enough information so we can link the checks to the schools and teams. The flyer also has a section for filling out team information if you want to mail that.

Rosie Salinas
Department of Computer Science
One Trinity Place
San Antonio, TX 78212-7200

Location, Map, and Directions

The competition will be held at Trinity in various buildings on the north side of campus. Being a Saturday you can park in any of the regular lots at Trinity or along the streets that Trinity to Shook. From there you will go to Northrup Hall for registration.

Directions to Campus

Map of Trinity Campus - On this map the Cobb-Racy building is (10). The actual competition will be held in various labs in the Halsell Administrative Studies Building (7) and the Cowles Life Science Building (9).

For the Team Coaches

During the competition any teachers who come with their teams can hang around in the Science Lecture Hall and we will display the live results from the competition so that you can see how your teams are doing. We would also like to take that time to get to know you and to know if there are any ways that Trinity and the Trinity CS department can help you in your teaching. This time can also be used as a general question and answer for anything that you might have on your mind. If you have ideas for what we could do during the time that the students are coding that would benefit you the most, let us know when you contact us for registration and we will see what we can do.

Past Competitions

These links go to the pages for our competitions in the past. They include final standings, problem sets, and in some cases, solution sets.

2005 Contest

2006 Contest

2007 Contest

2008 Contest

2009 Contest