More than 100 student software programmers from 27 universities in 18 countries participated in the annual software programming bootcamp launched in Barcelona by Moscow Workshops ICPC (International Collegiate Programming Contest).
Students from the Colorado School of Mines (U.S.), the University of British Columbia (Canada), the American University of Beirut (Lebanon), the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany), Nanjing University (China), the University of Tokyo (Japan), ITESM MTY (Mexico), Reykjavik University (Iceland) and many other educational institutions and research facilities in the U.S., Europe and Asia participated in the Hello Barcelona bootcamp.
The initiative helped young software programmers prepare for the ICPC World Finals, the world’s most prestigious coding competition. Annually, more than 300,000 students from 3,000 universities around the world participate in the contest.
The mission of the Hello Barcelona bootcamp was to make software programming accessible to everyone. The training was available to students of different coding levels. Participants competed in two different groups of software programmers.
Division A prepared students for the next round of the ICPC World Finals, while Division B helped teams in the regional and international ICPC competitions.
In Division A two teams from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) took both the first and the second places while a team from ITMO University took third place.
In Division B first place went to École Polytechnique, followed by Lund University and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.
Coaches leading this workshop included:
- Andrey Stankevich, ICPC gold medalist, Senior Coach Award winner 2016
- Oleg Khristenko, co-founder of the Pankratiev Open Cup
- Gleb Evstropov, Facebook Hacker Cup finalist
- Mike Mirzayanov, Google Code Jam finalist
- Mikhail Tikhomirov, finalist of the Topcoder Open (TCO) and the Russian Code Cup
- Ivan Smirnov, Google Code Jam finalist.
The workshop ran from September 26th to October 4th at Media-TIC, one of Barcelona’s major business incubators and at Barcelona Activa, an organisation developing economic policies to ensure a better quality of life for Barcelona residents.
During the eight-day workshop teams were busy with practice contests, problem solving exercises, discussion sessions and lectures.
Participants of ICPCs are the programming elite of the world. ICPC has been running for over 40 years with past winners including such tech visionaries as Adam D’Angelo, a co-founder of Quora; Nikolai Durov, a co-founder of Telegram; Matei Zaharia, a co-founder of Databricks; and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh.
The Moscow Workshops ICPC have developed unique training methods to prepare students to compete at the highest levels of the ICPC World Finals.
“We achieved a spectacular result at the ICPC Finals in 2018 with 10 out of 13 medalists being graduates of our workshops,” said Alexey Maleev, the founder of Moscow Workshops ICPC and a vice-rector for International Programs and Technological Entrepreneurship at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.
“In 2016 and 2017 we featured eight such participants out of 12 total medalists.”
“In coding there are no fundamental differences with the professional sport – practice allows you to achieve perfection,” said Gleb Evstropov, coach of the bootcamp.
“It’s important to spend your time as efficiently as possible. That’s why people train with more experienced peers and receive recommendations from coaches.”
According to Evstropov, Russia’s victories at the last seven ICPC World Finals can be explained by the number of former winners participating in the training of new students.
The bootcamp was organised in collaboration with Harbour.Space University in Barcelona, MIPT and the programming community Codeforces.
On November 6, 2018 the Moscow Workshops ICPC will hold an international bootcamp in Russia’s capital. The training will take place at MIPT. The registration period for students is already open.
Moscow Workshops ICPC
This unique educational project has already hosted 1,600 participants from 171 universities in 51 countries. Each year the Moscow Workshops ICPC hosts international bootcamps in Spain, India, Belarus and Russia. Bootcamps last approximately nine days and typically include more than 25 challenges to prepare participants for competition. The project is supported by Kaspersky Lab, Facebook, Yandex, Huawei and other tech companies.
