Norge går for medaljer i verdensmesterskapet i programmering!

Hvert år deltar norske elever i forskjellige fagolympiader rundt om i verden: Fysikk, kjemi, matematikk, biologi osv. Det finnes en for deg som er interessert i programmering også: Den internasjonale informatikkolympiaden (IOI). For tiden gjør Johan Sokrates Wind, Michal Sladecek, Valentin Plotkin og Håvard Terland seg klar til årets mesterskap som arrangeres i Kazakhstan i månedskiftet juli/august.

Norske finalister i informatikk-OL i Taipei i 2014 diskuterer løsningen på en av oppgavene etter konkurransen.

For å komme seg til den nasjonale finalen må man kvalifisere seg gjennom tre nasjonale uttaksrunder. Den første er en prøve med flervalgsoppgaver, som man må løse på skolen i november (få læreren din til å melde seg på her: www.nio.no/pamelding). Den andre er online, der man får en uke til å løse noen programmeringsoppgaver i C++. Til slutt er det en nasjonal finale på Universitetet i Bergen, der man må løse fire programmeringsoppgaver i løpet av fem timer. De fire beste går videre derfra til OL. Les mer om NIO her. NIO har også en del gode læringsressurser som er verdt å sjekke du, de finner dere her.

Vi var så heldige at vi fikk pratet litt med kandidatene som skal til Kazakhstan, og stilte de følgende spørsmål:

• Kan du si litt om deg selv?
• Hvordan har du lært deg programmering, og hva var grunnen til at du startet med det?
• Kjenner du til Lær Kidsa Koding?
• Har du deltatt på internasjonale konkurranser via NIO tidligere, og hvordan har eventuelt det gått?
• Hva tenker du om verdensmesterskapet i Kazakhstan i sommer?
• Har du tips til gode ressurser for å lære seg programmering?

Først ut er Håvard Terland fra Bergen.

• Jeg er 17 år, og går i andre klasse på Bergen katedralskole. Jeg er interessert i ganske mye forskjellig, men da spesielt matematikk og teoretisk datavitenskap, samt politikk, filosofi og litteratur. Jeg skal studere på UiB etter sommeren (parrallelt med 3. klasse), og kommer nok til å begynne der etter VGS.
• Jeg ble inspirert til å lære med programmering av min far. Han forklarte meg en del grunnleggende ideer, og etter det er egentlig alt selvlært. Det tok lang tid å lære seg programmering, men jeg hadde motivasjon, så det gikk fint. Jeg begynte med HTML og JavaScript, og gikk så videre til Flash AS2- og 3.
• Ja! Jeg har til og med vært med å hjelpe elever på Nordnes barneskole. Jeg synes det er et veldig veldig bra initiativ, og jeg håper det fortsetter å vokse!
• Ja, jeg deltok i fjor. Konkurransemessig har det gått dårlig, men jeg har lært mye både faglig og ikke-faglig. Men dårlig har det gått; andre gjør det mye bedre enn meg, i alle fall den dag i dag.
• Jeg er optimistisk; jeg tror jeg klarer å gjøre en betraktelig mye bedre jobb enn tidligere. Målet mitt er å havne i den øvre halvdel internasjonalt.
• Jeg tror det er en god ide å alltid ha en skikkelig god bok tilgjengelig! For de litt mindre tror jeg det viktigste er en god lærer – noe som forøvrig vil hjelpe alle. Konkrete bøker og nettsider har jeg ikke så mye kontroll på, desverre…

Nestemann ut er Michal Sladecek fra Slovakia. 

• My name is Michal and I am from Slovakia, I’ve been in Norway for an exchange year studying in second year on Frogn vgs. I like programming and informatics, traveling, hiking and I’m sometimes going to gym. My other hobbies are also movies, books and computer games, I love anything with good story. I’m also interested in mathematics and physics, but from sciences I’m concentrating mostly on informatics. I would like to study computer science, but I’m not sure which way I will go, machine learning or bioinformatics seem very interesting but there are also other possibilities.
•  I first started programming when I was 11, I tried python and I was doing pretty well from the beginning, but soon it became too difficult and I didn’t have anybody to help me so I took a break until I was 14. I don’t even remember the reason why I tried it, I think I just heard the word “programming” somewhere and I wanted to know what it means, so I tried it. After I was pretty good at writing small programs I just googled “programming competition” in my country and I found out a competition for high school students which has format of sending programming tasks on which we had a long period of time. The tasks were very interesting (it was similar to NIO tasks) and I was very motivated so I was working on each task few days until i got it done. Now the same tasks would take me half an hour. I was between first 30 so they invited me to a one week camp where we were learning much, mostly theory about algorithms and data structures, but we also had lot of fun and I made some of my best friends there.
• I never heard about LKK before, maybe because I’m not from Norway. On my school it was not propagated, I’m already on high school and it looks like it’s meant for smaller children which is very good because when you are on high school it can be too late to learn programming and pariticipate in NIO or IOI, my classmates mostly didn’t know any coding before and so they really failed in the NIO.
• I never participated in IOI before, but I represented Norway on the Baltic olympiad in Poland and I got bronze medal, which means I was in the better half of participants. I think it was really great experience and I’m glad for the medal.
• I’m very happy I can go to Kazakhstan, I think it will be great and I will have lot of fun. I’m not sure about the results but I know the tasks will be very difficult and I will try to do my best. I will try to prepare a lot, but I probably don’t have much time for it in July. It will be really interesting summer as it also looks like I was invited by one company for two week trip to San Diego, which should be just before the olympiad so I hope it will also work out.
• My resources were some articles and books, but now I would choose some code teaching interactive website like codeacademy or Khanacademy. After learning basics of language there are many different ways they can go. I decided to do mostly competitive programming, in which case I had to learn lot of algorithms and data structures, the resources here were mostly internet for me, best was using more sources on the same time as I often didn’t understand some topic and then I needed to google a lot. In competitive programming there’s also need to know C++ or Java, in NIO it was C++ only. Of course there are many other ways to go, many my friends are doing robotics which is completely different world and some are spending their time coding games, apps or webpages, which I also do little bit. One other tip is to make a Quora account where they can follow programming topics because there is lot to learn from it and I’m using it very often. To me it also helped that I started using Linux (Ubuntu), but that’s probably not so important, I saw many good coders using Windows or Mac, it’s just my personal preference that it’s easier for me to code on Linux.

Tredjemann er Johan Sokrates Wind fra Tromsø.

• Jeg er 19 år gammel og bor i Tromsø, liker å programmere, løse Rubiks kube og spille bordtennis.
• Lager hovedsakelig spill, grafikk og i det siste har jeg gjort mange konkurranse-oppgaver.
• Jeg mener programmering er nyttig og relativt enkelt i forhold til hvor få som kan det, så LKK høres ut som et godt tiltak.
• Lærte selv å programmere gjennom KTurtle, gikk så over til python, så til C, og nå lager jeg det meste i C++.

Jeg synes det er synd at så få har hørt om NIO. Jeg anbefaler den på det sterkeste til alle interesserte.

– Johan Sokrates Wind

Sistemann er Valentin Plotkin fra Russland.

• I’m born in Russia, came to Norway in 2009. I am currently moving from Bergen to Tronheim to
  study cybernetics and robotics.
• I started “learning to program”, so to say, at age of 11, when I accidentally ran across some old
  programming textbooks in a library.
• I didn’t knew that LKK exists before your mail, but I think it’s a great idea to establish some sports-and-arts-unrelated “after school” activity in Norway and also to reduce amount of general computer illiteracy in the population.
• This year is the first time I participated in NIO.
• I see the Kazakhstan championship as a possibility to visit a new place, talk to new people and spent some hours puzzling my head over the hopelessly difficult tasks.
• Personally I think it was easier for me to learn CS from logic gates up, as taking any other way would involve more unexplained magic than I could tolerate. I also preffered to learn obsolete technologies, like McCarthy’s LISP, PDP-8, VM/370 and so on, in order to understand the modern ones. I generally found old (pre-PC) computer manuals the most valuable learning resource, as things usually taken as obvious or automagical by today’s textbook writers are explained in depth there.

Vi ønsker Johan, Michal, Valentin og Håvard lykke til i Kazakhstan!