How To Solve Informatics Olympiad?

What all can I do to train students for Zonal Informatics Olympiad?

• I am on a vacation and I have loads of free time on my hands. I want to train a few students from my alma mater for Zonal Informatics Olympiad (http://www.iarcs.org.in/inoi/). What all should I keep in mind while designing the structure? Please note that the students have never heard of Informatics Olympiads and this year, no body qualified from the nearest center as well. I myself have three years of ACM-ICPC experience. Any guidance would be great.

• Answer:

  First of all, it's nice to see someone encouraging high school students to get into this field. The aim of ZIO is to identify students who might be good at algorithms without actually testing their coding skills. So the short answer would be to teach them algorithms without getting into the coding part. You can teach any algorithm that doesn't require prerequisites, e.g., reducing problems to graph theoretical problems, basic searches on graphs, dynamic programming, sorting, problems that can be reduced once the input is sorted, etc. A lot of ad hoc problems are also asked, so it will help a lot to solve the previous years questions.