Workshops Fall 2024

As every year, we organised three workshops during autumn to introduce beginners to the Swiss Olympiad in Informatics and teach them about programming and algorithmic design. Aside from being an excellent preparation for the competition, the workshops are also an opportunity to get to know like-minded people and a motivation to persevere during the long challenge of the first round.

The participants could register for up to three one-day workshops. The first workshop took place at ETH Zurich. The second one was held simultaneously in Zurich and at EPF Lausanne and the third one took place at the University of Bern.

The workshops began with an introduction to C++ and runtime analysis. The participants were divided into two tracks, an advanced track and a beginners track, so everyone would be challenged. There were lectures on graph theory, dynamic programming, greedy algorithms and binary search. Between the lectures, there was always time to practice the newly learned concepts in interesting tasks. Leaders and participants spent a lot of time discussing tricky problems and finding well-hidden bugs.

Lunch was offered by SOI. We were enjoying Pizzas and Pitas. During the breaks there was time to get to know the other participants, relax and rest the tired brains by playing games. There were rounds of Tichu, Hanabi and Ligretto taking place.

At the end of the workshops, participants went home having learned and practiced many algorithms and with some of our new SOI stickers featuring duck vader. We hope to see many of the participants again in our camp!

You can find some pictures on our Flickr.