Competitive Programming Academics
The Department of Computer Science is housed in the L3Harris Engineering Center (HEC) on UCF’s main campus in Orlando. The department has shown excellence in research, innovation and teaching. The university ranks 14th in the nation under U.S. News and World Report’s list of “Most Innovative Schools.” The department ranks in the top 50 nationwide for publishing in the most selective Computer Science conferences, with a rank of 6th in computer vision, 13th in visualization and 25th in Human-Computer Interaction.
The department is home to UCF’s Championship Programming and nationally ranked Cyber Defense Teams. The Programming Team has finished first place in 8 of the last 10 years at the ICPC Southeast Regional Programming Contest and placed top 20 at the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals three times in the last four years, finishing as the top team in the United States twice in the last four years. The Cyber Defense Team has placed first or second nationally in 5 of the last 6 years. The majority of students from both teams get offers from the most selective companies in the United States.
This camp will separate students into two different courses (Introductory-Division B, Advanced-Division A). A majority of the students will automatically be placed in either Division A or B based on their first contest performance. Some students, however, will be given the option to choose which Division they would like to join. The lecture topics will be provided for both Divisions to help these students make their choice. Roughly speaking, we expect USACO Bronze and Silver students to be in the Introductory group and USACO Gold and Platinum students to be in the Advanced group. (There have been exceptions to this break down in past camps as students’ performance on our contests isn’t always identical to how they perform on USACO.)
Course Overview
The course will alternate between two separate schedules – one for days with four hour contests and one for days without contests. There will be a total of 5 mock contests. Due to the length of the contests and their intensity, relatively few other academic activities will occur on those days. On the days without contests, the morning will consist of lectures on a specified topic, followed by time for students to work on their own compiled library of pre-written algorithms and data structures, corresponding to the day’s lecture. In addition, students will be encouraged to solve problems they didn’t get correct in contest after the staff has reviewed how to solve these problems in the problem review. If a Codeforces round occurs during instruction time, the schedule may be modified to allow all students to participate in the round.