ECOO questions

[y4y]

Hey guys iI'm considering entering the ECOO and was wondering the min and max team sizes.
Also what is it like the rules requirements etc. Let me know anything you think I should.
The dynamics of the contests etc.
For example does each team member get his own workstation? stuff like that.

Also how many teams generally participate from the WRDSB?

I'd prefer reading first hand experiences than being linked to the official ECOO page.

thanks guys.

[crossley7]

ECOO is a school competition with teams of up to 4 players. I believe you can enter with 1 if you wanted but it isn't recommended. I have seen some of the best individual coders get their asses kicked because their teammates weren't as strong or they didn't work well together.

3 hour contest, 4 problems, 1 computer, only documentation is the built in stuff such as Turing help docs.

scoring varies by problem, but perfect solutions are 100 points plus 10 if it is a first submission plus 1 for every 5 minutes left in the contest.

No idea how many participate from your scholboard though.

[mirhagk]

Usually there are 5 inputs and each input correct gives 20 points, but that's not always the case. The input is very easy to parse, and the output isn't tricky to format, leaving the only difficult part really being the algorithm itself, so make sure you get some people that understand algorithms. What my team did last year (we came in 3rd overall) was distribute the problems among everyone, one to each. The first problem was usually just brute force, or something easy, so the main coder takes that problem and does it while everyone else works on solving the rest of the problems. I found problem #2 generally to be something that just took a while to code, but wasn't difficult analytically, however there was sometimes some things that could speed it up, so one person looks at that while the first person is coding. The 3rd and 4th problems are a little harder so generally there should be the other 2 people working together to solve those.

Personally for my group I was the strongest coder by far, so we found it faster just to have other people break the problem down and then spend about 2-3 minutes explaining the problem to me, and the solution. Ideally you'd have a group with 2 strong coders and 2 strong algorithms/mathematics guys, and work basically in groups of 2, switching in and out for each problem, but it's often hard to find 2 people equally skillful in programming.

[QuantumPhysics]

ECOO huh? This sounds really interesting, I would love to get into this contest! Do you guys know if they have an official website. Let alone what the name derives for?

[mirhagk]

ecoo stands for educational computing organization of ontario. Their website is currently in transition, its normally just ecoo.org but temporarily they have switched to http://ecoocs.org/ for the computer science competition. If you look at last year's winners you'll see my school in 3rd (YAY!), you can also grab past year's problems.

[y4y]

hey guys what do you suggest as an IDE for c++?
currently we are using code blocks but it doesn't seem to have any resources or F1 functionality.

we may consider switching languages but an IDE switch is preferable.

[mirhagk]

Visual studio is a pretty awesome IDE for C#, I'm not 100% sure what the C++ support is like nowadays, but I remember it being pretty good back in 2008 and they've apparently done a lot more work with supporting C++ lately.

Get the express versions, they are free, and are just missing a few large scale team and project management tools that you won't even know exist.

If you want F1 functionality, you'll have to make sure to install help files locally, otherwise it just uses the MSDN forums, which is actually better most of them time, but if you don't have internet access it's useless.