When I finished grade 10 in 2014, I had no knowledge whatsoever about programming let alone Competitive programming. I was studying the Maharashtra SSC board syllabus. There was literally nothing about programming in the syllabus. That should change. Coding should be taught in secondary school as an elective atleast and exposure to competitive programming should be offered to interested students grade 9 onwards. Maths skills relevant to programming should also be taught to interested students and finally the school must educate the parents of this competitive programming arena through seminars.
P.S. I was introduced to programming in grade 11(junior college).
Lack of awareness: I have seen many students donât know about competitive programming. Every college should aware student about competitive programming. They may host college contest on regular bases like 2 times in a month, to understand student how fun is programming is.
Tutorials: Tutorials on basic topic should be provided to student. So, student can learn easily. As i seen the basic problem student faces that they dont know how to code in Competitive programming. So proper tutorial is provided for that.
Time consuming: As for beginners there are some problems which are very complicated and difficult to understand and sometimes difficult to implement. It consumes too much time.
At end i would like to say Competitive programming scenario can only be improved by providing awareness and to let them know that way they know how much fun to code is.
Hello, Instead of thinking of how to improve, why not think of why it is not in being practiced by many people(students) in India. I am a student and I have very few people in my college who really like to code. There are several reasons:
First thing is, our education system do not bother whether we actually learn coding. What matters is, completing syllabus on time. In the end students take courses outside just to land a job.
There is no coding environment, our theoretical knowledge is seen instead of practical knowledge. Most of the students just by heart the programs to pass the exams.
There are very few events which promote CP, many beginners give CP when they cannot solve complex problems in few available competitions online.
Many of people do not learn CP because they think the companies hiring them will train them anyway so why wasting time on learning on their own.
There is no proper guidance for CP. Even I am struggling learning it on my own. There are very few institutions which have qualified Professors who can guide on CP.
These are common problems I found while networking with many people around my city in events and hackathons.
So if there can be some platform for beginners to start CP from beginning where they can get proper guidance, it will create interest in them. The platform may be just a small club or community.
Or if everyone can decide to guide few people(friends), more people will join automatically. I have my own team, which started with 2 members and it has now grown up to 20+ members in few months, and we are learning CP on our own.
I think point 2 is the most important. There is absolutely no incentive for school students to study computer science. Even if a student wants to enter a technical stream and even if that stream is CS, only his knowledge of physics, chemistry and maths is used to judge his capabilities.
Yes, it is the BIGGEST hindrance, yet we cannot do anything about it . Of course, some admissions are offered on basis of excellent performance in CP (Like direct admission in IIIT-H if you get _____ in IOI or perhaps something like that?) but those options are very limited, and risky. Any parent would want his child to study PCM for a secure future.
And I think I didnt even got to the fact that how âplacementâ is sometimes the only reason one starts CP in college- we need to work on how user can appreciate it.
Rewards are only given to Top 10/20 coders. I fail to see how removing reward for those top people going to âmotivateâ the other thousands of coders behind them.
You are greatly exaggerating it when you say that it is âintegral part of education systemâ in Russia.
Most of children donât face it at all during their school years, except of those who attend one of the very few specialized schools which put it into their course (and to me it feels like there are maybe 10 such schools over whole country), or they are doing it on their own.
Iâm from Ukraine, and situation here is generally similar. I didnât know about competitive programming almost till the end of 10th grade - so I discovered it a bit over a year before finishing school.
And in my case the reason was not education system, but huge effort on popularization of this activity by guys from the university which I later enrolled - they were ICPC Gold medalists a year before that and they did their best to promote competitive programming.
Mate, itâs still better than India. I got to know about arrays at the end of 12th grade!!. I still wish i had got to know about competitive programming earlier.
@vijju123 I clearly emphasized on giving equal privileges to coders of all countries, so as to attract best coders to increase competition, and those 10-20 coders most of the times goes upto rank 80-100, and indian users coming in top-10 in codechef will not even come in top-50 if the good coders start competing at codechef as you can see from codeforces standings of any competition, none of them makes in the top-50.
As a person from outside India I can say that what you pointed out isnât among important reasons why a lot of strong contestants from outside India donât participate in CodeChef contests.
Yep; that describes my subjective point of view - on one hand, I may be wrong about some stuff on that list; on the other hand - I already understand that I even missed a few more points there; and since I got several people messaging me with âYou just wrote down what everybody had in mind but didnât want to sayâ I believe I got it mostly correct.
I think training is the key word here, and training not just for ICPC but also for science Olympiads. I guess some of the high rated programmers are medallist in some science Olympiads. I read some blogs on CodeForces where some people mentioned that transitioning to CP(competitive programming) after preparing for math Olympiad for several years was easy.
I dont want every school going student to participate in CP(as the curriculum is very bulky in india) but they all can at least have a strong foundation in maths before trying CP, and they can have it by preparing for Olympiads.
Yes, it seems that one reason is that strong math background itself is really, really helpful in CP, and other reason is that having general experience with spending a lot of time on preparation to competition (it may be some other discipline, not even math) often leads to having better self-discipline and being more hardworking during training for CP.
Well, 7 stars arent manufactured somewhere that we can increase that rapidly lol XD
In a cut throat competition, yes your point stands that 7 star people will work hard. But I think thats it . It may not be the best/most-efficient step for helping to 5 and 6 stars to be 7 stars.
Regarding latter half of your answer,I will say it illustrates the fault in thinking of majority of coders. Let me ask-
âWHY ARE YOU WAITING TO BE SPOONFED?â Internet,resources,everything is at your hand! Look, we can provide the spark to set the fire, after that its on you. We cannot,and SHOULD not, spoonfeed
@o_0 , think a little more on your suggestion. There are many downsides of it as well, and it further promotes the issue of âLosing motivation.â And as I said, I dont see it affecting bulk in any way. We have to take steps so that more people are well versed with CP, there are more good coders from country- for this we need something which affects the bulk. I hope my point came across clearly, thanks!
@taran_1407-Blaming the education system that much isnt correct, and not productive in my opinion (since we cannot do anything about that). They feel schools should focus of development side of CS (teaching things like Word, Excel in detail for future use, focusing on principle of OOPS in programming etc) and are not wrong in holding those views either. They are just different from ours.
Ultimately the main factors are awarenesss and incentive. If you didnt know arrays till class 12th,then we should treat it as awareness issue than education system. They cant include everything in syllabus
. Of course, some admissions are offered on basis of excellent performance in CP (Like direct admission in IIIT-H if you get _____ in IOI or perhaps something like that?) but those options are very limited, and risky. Any parent would want his child to study PCM for a secure future.
. It may not be the best/most-efficient step for helping to 5 and 6 stars to be 7 stars.