Canadian Competition Guidelines

Eligibility

You may participate as an official contestant if you meet the following criteria:
  • registered as a full-time student in Form 4-7 or Grade 10-13 in a secondary school in Hong Kong
  • you must be born on or after July 1, 1989.
Students who are interested should contact their teachers/school headmaster and do the online registration.

Note that only contestants who compete in the Senior contest are eligible for invitation to the Stage 2 contest.

The top 2 finishers must attend the Stage 2 contest to be held in Canada. The organizers reserve the right to withdraw a winner's place and its associated prize in Stage 1 if the winner is not going to attend the Stage 2 contest.

Please refer to this for details.

Languages

For the Stage 1 contest, contestants will work with PC in a lab. We provide the following programming development platforms:

For Stage 2 contest (to be held in Canada), the only allowed languages are C, C++ and Pascal. Java may also be allowed, but please visit the website of the University of Waterloo to confirm.

Competition Rules

  • Books and written materials are allowed. Machine-readable material is not allowed. (Online help facilities are allowed if built into the programming language package.)

  • During the Competition, each contestant will be provided with a computer to use. There is to be no communication between contestants, nor should any contestant access resources of any type outside the competition site (in particular, no Internet access will be provided.)

  • The Competition is composed of 5 programming questions. For these programs, it is the performance on the test data which determines the score. Each contestant may choose either to solve the 5 Junior level problems or the 5 Senior level problems. Only one set of problems (Junior or Senior) may be marked per contestant, and only those who participates in the Senior level problems will be considered for winning the grand prize (i.e., the all-expenses paid trip to Canada).

  • Each contestant is allowed exactly THREE HOURS working time.

  • The contestants are encouraged to keep the Competition papers.

  • No contestants arriving later than 5:30pm will be allowed to join the contest.

Decision Rights

The organizers reserve all rights to all final decisions in this contest.

Topics Covered

Problems are generally mathematical in nature, and not a contest in designing graphics or user-interfaces. To do well, you have to be a good problem-solver, be able to think algorithmically (i.e., how to write a sequence of steps to solve a problem) and be comfortable enough to code in a programming language. Specific topics for each contest are shown below:

Junior Senior
selection
repetition
arrays
recursion
data structures (e.g., lists)
string manipulation
 string manipulation
recursion
optimization
simulation
geometry
enumeration (i.e., counting)
sorting
searching
graph search
dynamic programming

Please visit this site for problems posted for previous contests.

 
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