HS Programming Contest @ GFU

2025 High School Programming Contest - April 12th

Contest Information

The 2025 High School Programming Contest, sponsored and run by George Fox University's Computer Science & Cybersecurity Programs, will be held online Saturday, April 12th, 2025. We hope that this page holds all of the information necessary for competitors in the competition.

2025 Contest Problems - Make sure to select the correct division for your team:
Contest problems will go live at the start of the contest.

Contest Final Results

2025 Important Note: We will be offering both on campus and virtual contests. The on campus contest will be in conjunction with the Computer Science Teachers Assoc. Conference at GFU. All team registrations will be considered tentative until verified by a teacher at your school. Teams must be verified to compete. There is no limit on number of teams from a single school in the virtual contest, however there will be a limit on teams on campus due to space considerations.

TEAM REGISTRATION: To register, make sure you have:

School Name
Teacher's name and email
Team name (have fun but be appropriate)
What division to compete in (D-I, D-II, D-III explained below)
On campus at GFU or virtual participation
Name and email for each team member (minimum of 2, maximum of 3)

REGISTRATION IS OPEN THROUGH WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9th: Download and complete the registration spreadsheet for all teams competing from your school: HS_Contest_Registration_Spreadsheet Send the completed registration spreadsheet to the site director, Dr. Brent Wilson, via email at bwilson@georgefox.edu

We offer a couple different options for schools to be involved in different capacities.

Mon-Fri, April 7th-11th there will be a non-competitive contest that will run the whole week. Problems will be available to solve via the contest system. Teachers can use these problems as projects during the week or to give various students additional practice. How you use this week's problems is entirely up to you. Teachers should contact the site director for a classroom set of credentials if you wish to utilize this resource.
To register teams for the competitive contest on Saturday, April 12th... please use the link above.
There are three divisions available: Div-I (hard college problems), Div-II (intermediate to advanced HS problems), and Div-III (easy to intermediate HS problems). Choose wisely AND appropriately.
New for 2025:Teams can compete either virtually or in-person at GFU. While the problem sets will be the same for like divisions whether a team competes on site or virtually, in-person teams will only be competing against other in-person teams and the same will be true for virtual teams.

bwilson@georgefox.edu

503-554-2722

Schedule

The tentative schedule of events for Saturday, April 12th is as follows:

8:30–9:30 AM	Team check-in (virtual via Zoom; link provided later)
9:30–10:00 AM	Team briefing (virtual via Zoom; link provided later)
10:00 AM	Contest begins
3:00 PM	Contest ends

Team Divisions

A single team shall consist of 2–3 students. There are three divisions: Division I, II, & III.

Division III consists of students who are in the beginning stages of developing their algorithmic problem-solving skills. Div. III teams may have competed before but probably only solved a small handful of problems.
Division II consists of teams who have been coding for at least a year and may have competed before. They probably would have completed over half of the problems but would have not previously placed 1st, 2nd, or 3rd in a similar division,
Division I is a much harder division.. The majority of the problems will be similar to programming contest problems at the college/university level. This division is truly for the advanced students who want to challenge themselves and "go for the glory!"

To assist in determing the proper placement of your teams, problems in each division will be roughly based upon the following:

Division III	Formatting output Control structures (branching, looping) Boolean logic String manipulation
Division II	All Division III topics Multi-dimensional lists/arrays Recursion Searching and sorting Basic data structures (e.g., trees, graphs)
Division I	All Division II & III topics It's a surprise...

Contest Logistics & Rules

Virtual Teams: Teams will work remotely and utilize their own communication channel (SMS, discord, slack, phone, etc) for discussing and sharing information, code, etc. with all team members. Teams may use 1 computer for each team member. Each team will receive one set of login credentials... the contest system (purposefully) does not allow for two or more simultaneous logins from the same account. This account becomes a shared resource that each team must navigate.
On Site Teams: Teams will be give a workspace with power. Each team needs to bring one computer with the ability to connect to a wireless network for the competition. That computer becomes your shared resource that each team must navigate.

As soon as a team believes it has implemented a correct solution to a problem, it should submit their program through the online web-based submission system.

If the team's program does not correctly solve the specified problem on the first attempt, the team is allowed to submit a revised solution. Beyond simply incrementing the count of problems correctly solved, each correct solution will also receive a "time score" which represents the total elapsed time since the start of the contest, plus any time penalties for incorrect submissions. The time scores only come into play when there is a tie for a given count of problems correctly solved.

For example:

Team 1 correcly solves its first problem in 30 minutes on its first submission for that problem. Team 1 now has a score of 1 (correctly-solved problem) with a time score of 30 (minutes).
20 minutes later (i.e., 50 minutes into the contest), Team 1 solves a second problem on its first submission. Team 1 now has a score of 2, with a time score of 80 (i.e., 30 + 50).
Meanwhile, Team 2 submits an incorrect solution for its first problem 15 minutes into the contest. They are able to fix their submission and resubmit it at the 45 minute mark of the contest. Team 2's score now has a score of 1, with a time score of 65 (solution at 45, plus a 20-minute penalty for the incorrect submission on the problem).
If the contest ended at this point, Team 1 would win due to having 2 correctly-solved problems. The time score would only be considered if both teams were tied with 2; in that case, the lowest time score wins.

Contest problems have a very wide range of difficulty. Division I, II, & III have separate problem sets; however, there is typically some overlap (for example, the same problem might appear as an "easier" problem Division I and as a "harder" Division II problem). Moreover, we try to include at least a couple problems that every team should be able to solve.

D-II & D-III Problem sets from the 2021 contest are available for practice purposes:

2021 Division II
2021 Division III
There are no examples for the harder Division I because we like surprises :-)

Supported Languages and Compilers

Our contest judging system supports the following programming languages. Submitted programs will be compiled using the specified compiler flags below:

Language	Version	Compiler	Flags
Java	17	OpenJDK `javac` 17.0.10
C	C99	GCC `gcc` 11.4.0	`-std=c99`
C++	C++11	GCC `g++` 11.4.0	`-std=c++11`
Python	3.10	Python 3.10.12