From then on any communication must be only within each pair. Any cross-pair communication must go through the invigilator and is restricted to asking for up to a maximum of one question to be reallocated either from pair A to pair B or vice versa.
For the remaining 50 minutes, the team will divide into two pairs however they see best and must also divide the questions at this point also however they see best each question will be printed on a separate page. The invigilator should separate the two pairs within the room.
A supervising teacher does not require any coding expertise to host this competition at their school. Simply sign up for free, recruit your teams of four, encourage practice with the material provided and arrange a one hour invigilation session within the competition window.Lets go!
The supervising teacher will require no specialist knowledge but will invigilate to enforce the following basic rules. Further guidance will be sent to registered teachers together with the questions for secure storage which will be issued in February.
These can also be solved with short programs but will make more developed use of array processing or functions.
A maximum of two year 10 students are allowed to make up a team however a school can enter as many teams of four as they wish.*
Teams can code directly into the online submission window but many will prefer to use an installed development environment and copy/paste their code across. All submissions must be made strictly within the time allowed however.
The invigilating teacher must then complete an online form, that will be sent to them, to record team details and, importantly, upto four hackerrank usernames for each team along with a confirmation that all conditions of the competition format and invigilation have been met. Teachers do not need to send us any team logins or names in advance of their competition day.
These are aimed at easier versions of BIO level 2 questions which focus on modelling questions e.g. of a short game simulation.
Compete for The Braben Cup in an annual one hour competition for UK schools years 7 to 10 free entry
Scoring:Each challenge has a pre-determined score based on its level of difficulty. A teams score on each challenge is determined by the number of test cases a teams code submission successfully passes. If a team submits more than one solution per challenge then the teams score will reflect their best code submission. Teams are ranked by score. If two or more teams achieve the same overall score, then the tie is broken by the number of points achieved on the Level 4 questions and if that is also equal, by the numbers of submissions needed to achieve those Level 4 points (less being better). The organising committees decision will be final.
* students can be in teams of less than 4 if needed although this is not ideal. The max two year 10 rule still applies to smaller teams. Teams of two can either split after 10 minutes or can stay together as a single pair although only discussion (no coding) is allowed in the first 10 minutes. Teams of three must split into a two and a one.
These can be solved typically by under ten lines of code, sometimes a lot less. They will typically focus on some basic text or number processing.
Although the solutions themselves will be submitted online, the questions will be on paper copy as printed by the invigilating teacher who will collect and destroy all physical copies at the end of the session.If a school is entering multiple teams then all of those teams must sit the competition on the same date and time or in immediately contiguous times on the same date.
A team will be given a complete 10 minutes to divide and discuss the problems within their team. Discussion only in this time: no computers or pens/writing.
At the end of the full hour, the invigilating teacher will stop the exam and prevent any further submission of code at that point.
Within each pair, it is up to those two students to decide whether they work on just one computer together or two adjacent computers.
The nature of any prizes: see our prize pages on this site.
Start/closing dates:the competition window for coding submissions is shown on the homepage for each year. Registrations should be made at least a week before this window to ensure sufficient time for the material to be sent to the invigilating teaching
Restrictions:geographical (UK schools only), ages (teams of four from Y7-10 students with maximum of two Y10 students), technical (submissions must be made online to the competition coding site, hosted on hackerrank and invigilated by a teacher
This national competition for secondary schools pits teams of four students in Years 7 to 10 against each other in a timed one hour coding challenge which can be sat at any point in a nominated working fortnight in late February under local team supervision / invigilation.
Some sample level questions are available on the practice page.
How and when winner(s) will be notified, and when they will receive their prizes:details of winning schools / team names will be published within a month of the competition closing window (hopefully earlier). Details will be published on the site and winning schools will also be contacted via the invigilating teacher with prize money sent within six weeks of the competition closing date. Permission will be sought from winning schools/teams for any additional publicity material other than the team name and name of the school.
The promoters full name and business address:
The Perse School, Cambridge, CB2 8QF
Coding submissions will be supported in a number of different languages but these will be limited and reviewed each year based on demand from registering schools. Python, C++, C, Java and Visual are the main languages of choice for this competition.
Students must not access any other websites other than the competition site and the official language reference documentation. Students can also take in copies of up to 20 A4 sides (10 double sided pages) of printed code snippets to assist them.
All questions will receive one or more lines of input and produce one or more lines of output.
^ we intend to use competition service to host the submissions and automated testing/scoring for the first year of the competition. Test cases and sample code will be made available in full after the event.
Individual question submissions will be marked online instantly with feedback given regarding the number of test cases passed or failed although the test cases themselves will not be given^. Theoverall resultswill not be available until after the competition closes when team pair scores will be combined.
A number of question tasks will be available more than most teams will be able to complete in the hour permitted. These problems will range in difficulty from trivial to harder with points available for each task set accordingly. This format is designed with the intention that it encourages younger programmers and encourages teams to divide and conquer.
These are aimed at easier versions of British Informatics Olympiad level 1 questions and would typically involve iteration and selection.
How to participate:a teacher at a UK school should register on our free registration form on this website
Competition formal summary information:
Each submission will be subjected to automated tests to determine the points awarded (up to a maximum of 10/20/30/40 points for a Level 1/2/3/4 question respectively . Code submissions must complete within 4 seconds of processing time for each test.
The codemust notgenerate any output other than the answer. For this reasonno promptsshould be included in any code otherwise solutions will be marked incorrect by the marking engine.