Workshops Fall 2025

As every year, we organized two 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 second round.

The participants could register for one of the two workshops. The first workshop took place at EPF Lausanne. The second one was held at ETH Zurich. Participants from all over Switzerland and even Liechtenstein got together at our workshops.

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.

To get our blood flowing again during the Zurich workshop, we played a game of tag and even embarked on a challenging scavenger hunt across the city.

Lunch was offered by SOI, featuring döner kebab and sandwiches. During the breaks, participants had time to get to know one another, relax and give their tired brains a rest by playing games. Several rounds of Tichu and other games took place throughout the day.

SOI also offered dinner, as well as overnight accommodation for participants who had traveled from farther away.

At the end of the workshops, the participants went home having learned and practiced many algorithms, and having made some new friends. We hope to see many of them again at our camp!

You can find some pictures on our Flickr.