Next month, young programmers from more than a dozen countries will converge to Moscow for a coding bootcamp. They will get intensive training to prepare them to take part in the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), one of the world’s most prestigious tech competitions.
The bootcamp is organized by Moscow Workshops ICPC, an educational startup partnering with Kaspersky Lab, Facebook and Huawei. This Russian training method seems to have “cracked the code:” over the last three years, students trained by these Workshops took top places in the prestigious contest.
Thus, in 2016 and 2017 eight ICPC finals medalists received training in these workshops, while in 2018, 10 out of 13 medalists were graduates from there.
The Workshops were launched in 2012 by Alexey Maleev as a new course in computer science at the Moscow University of Physics and Technology (MIPT, also known as “Phystech”).
“As a recognized programming championship, the ICPC was a good benchmarking instrument to measure our students and improve their performance,” Maleev said. “We started to participate, dive into the rules and learn how it works. But it is impossible to train in just one university and take the top places in the world’s most prestigious competition.”
In a few years time, the Workshops developed very specific training methods that combined practice contests, problem solving exercises, discussion sessions, and lectures. The “secret sauce” might be in the coaches: they are all former participants and winners of the ICPC Finals.
Since 2012 the Moscow Workshops has trained 1,600 participants from 171 universities in 51 countries.
“There’s a huge demand for learning programming skills around the globe, and our bootcamps attract more young programmers every year. And this contributes to enlarging the ICPC community,” Maleev said.
Global training for global contest
Over the years, Moscow Worskshops ICPC have become an international training program that holds six bootcamps every year, half of which are organized outside Russia.
Thus, in early October, the first bootcamp took place at Hello Barcelona in Spain, in collaboration with Harbour.Space University, MIPT and the programming community Codeforces. The training attracted more than 100 students from 27 universities in 18 different countries, including the USA, Canada, France, Lebanon, Japan, Germany, Iceland, Brazil and Mexico.
The next international bootcamp will take place in Moscow from November 6 to 13 at MIPT. It will feature such renowned coaches as Oleg Khristenko, a co-founder of the Pankratiev Open Cup, and Mikhail Tikhomirov, a Topcoder Open finalist.
The series will continue with bootcamps held in Kollam (India), Grodno (Belarus), Vladivostok in the Russian Far East.
The ICPC has been running for 40 years, and now attracts more than 300,000 students from 3,000 universities across the world every year.
In April this year, Russian teams won the contest for the eighth time. Past winners include Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh.
