Computer Science Contents for High School Students

7th Annual High School Programming Contest

http://dp.seas.upenn.edu/pclassic2004/

The Philadelphia Classic is a one day competition that challenges up to twenty one of the area's top four-person high school teams with eight challenging questions for great prizes and school recognition. In an effort to make the contest more enjoyable and fair to all participants, graphical tools will be provided for all teams to facilitate easy submission and testing. The custom built GUI will provide relevant information while ensuring fairness by limiting access to those tools necessary for the contest. In addition to the actual competition, everyone will be given a tour of the engineering facilities at the University of Pennsylvania, including a look at ENIAC, the world's first general-purpose, electronic, digital computer. Distinguished speakers from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Computer and Information Sciences department will also speak to the students. Lunch will be provided for all members of the competition. There will be a coaches lounge with real-time score updates during the contest. An awards ceremony will take place shortly following the competition, and all competitors will receive T-shirts and certificates commemorating their participation. Furthermore, all teams will go home with copies of the final results and solutions to the problems for their study. The competition is free to all participating teams. Regrettably, the organizing committee can not pay for transportation, parking, or accommodations costs incurred by individual teams. However, no team will be denied entry into the tournament for financial reasons alone. Registration is on a first come, first serve basis, limited to twenty participating schools. To make sure that your school is one of the selected few, register today!

FIRST Robotics Competition

http://www.usfirst.org/robotics/index.html

The FIRST Robotics Competition is an exciting, multinational competition that teams professionals and young people to solve an engineering design problem in an intense and competitive way. The program is a life-changing, career-molding experience—and a lot of fun. In 2004 the competition will reach more than 20,000 students on over 900 teams in 27 competitions. Our teams come from Canada, Brazil, Great Britain, and almost every U.S. state. The competitions are high-tech spectator sporting events, the result of lots of focused brainstorming, real-world teamwork, dedicated mentoring, project timelines, and deadlines. Colleges, universities, corporations, businesses, and individuals provide scholarships to our participants. Involved engineers experience again many of the reasons they chose engineering as a profession, and the companies they work for contribute to the community while they prepare and create their future work force. The competition shows students that the technological fields hold many opportunities and that the basic concepts of science, math, engineering, and invention are exciting and interesting.

RoboCup Junior

http://www.robocupjunior.org

RoboCupJunior is a project-oriented educational initiative that sponsors local, regional and international robotic events for young students. It is designed to introduce RoboCup to primary and secondary school children, as well as undergraduates who do not have the resources to get involved in the senior leagues. The focus in the junior league is on education. RoboCup is an international effort whose purpose is to foster Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics research by providing a standard problem where a wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined. As well, the initiative serves as a basis for project-oriented education. RoboCupJunior offers several challenges, each emphasizing both cooperative and competitive aspects. For children, the Junior initiative provides an exciting introduction to the field of robotics, a new way to develop technical abilities through hands-on experience with electronics, hardware and software, and a highly motivating opportunity to learn about teamwork while sharing technology with friends. In contrast to the one-child-one-computer scenario typically seen today, RoboCupJunior provides a unique opportunity for participants with a variety of interests and strengths to work together as a team to achieve a common goal.