UMD High School Programming Contest Environment

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Contact Info

Contest Rules

Students compete in teams of four. Programs are written in Java, and submitted electronically to the judges who test the programs and decide if a submission satisfies the correctness criteria. Contestants are allowed to bring textbooks and notes, but no disks or other computer media. If you are interested in additional details about the format of the competition, you can view the complete rules.

Contest Software

Starting in 2011, we will be using the PC^2 (Programming Contest Control) System developed at CSU Sacramento. A PC^2 tutorial is available here.

Programming in Java

Contestants for the programming contest are required to submit their solutions in Java. The programming contest is not designed to test your knowledge of features of Java, so students only need to learn Java sufficiently well to implement their programs efficiently and correctly. Only the subset of Java used by the Advanced Placement Computer Science exam is needed.

AP Computer Science

Computers

Contestants will likely be using Apple MacBook laptop computers. Unfortunately no mice will be provided. However, teams ARE allowed to bring and use their own USB mice.

Java Environment

We have selected Eclipse as the Java integrated development environment (IDE) for the contest. This is the same Java development system used by CMSC 131, the introductory Java programming course at the University of Maryland. We will be using the Java 1.6 runtime environment. Teams may also edit Java programs manually using standard text editors and compile and run Java programs using the standard compiler (javac) and interpreter (java).

Directions for Using the Eclipse Development Environment

To download Java and the Eclipse development environment:
- You can find directions to download Java, Eclipse, and Eclipse plugins here.
- On Windows, Eclipse will create a 'workspace' directory that will contain all of your Java files. If you ran Eclipse directly from the directory it is installed in, the workspace directory will be within the Eclipse directory. If you ran it from a desktop shortcut, the 'workspace' directory will be in the directory you configured the shortcut to start in.
To run the Eclipse development environment:
- You can find a tutorial for Eclipse here.
- You can create a new project and download the program JavaEyes.java into the project directory in your Eclipse workspace. Select File->Refresh, and then Run->Run As->Application to run your first Java program in Eclipse!