Hello! 👋

We are inviting you 🫵 to join our Introduction to Competitive Programming course. This course is targeted for students interested in learning CS and perhaps participating in the 2025 National Olympiad in Informatics.

No prior experience is required! We will teach all the skillsets necessary to get started in competitive programming, starting from the basics of C++ syntax - don’t worry if you’ve never done programming prior to this.

You will be trained to solve problems with an algorithmic nature, such as those found in NOI and other similar competitive programming competitions. Participants will be equipped with both the foundational tools to deconstruct such problems as well as some common methods to solve these problems.

This course is targeted towards schools who have little to no computer science resources available and due to the limited manpower those students will be given priority access.

What is IO and why should I do it

There is the tangible and pragmatic aspect of IO that helps you get special consideration in NUS SoC, build your portfolio, and prepare for coding interviews:

• Doing well in IO competitions in secondary and pre-tertiary education will also grant you a competitive advantage when preparing for university. Strong performances in NOI will merit special consideration in NUS - in particular, automatic admission is granted to JC participants in NOI who obtain a gold medal.
• In IO, you practice creative thinking as you are required to come up with innovative solutions to challenging tasks. In the later stages, you will be able to think for long periods and persevere when faced with extremely hard problems.

However, a lot of people do IO problems just because the intellectual stimulation received from solving these problems is fun! It is analogous to why people can spend hours a day playing chess or Go. People just enjoy it!

• You will be a better thinker and problem solver — you have the skill of decomposing problems to make them easier to solve, you can optimize code and use data structures to make your program run faster, and these skills acquired through competitive programming are transferrable and highly sought-after in the industry, which makes IO a worthwhile investment of time if you are an aspiring CS professional.

Sample Problem