Encouraging algorithmic thinking without a computer

Abstract

At the secondary school level, traditional programming competitions remain inaccessible to the vast majority of students. We describe the Australian Informatics Competition(AIC), a pen-and-paper event that is accessible to a much broader audience but still retains a core focus on algorithms. In addition to multiple choice questions, a unique feature of the AIC is its three-stage tasks that invite algorithmic thinking by posing similar problems of increasing size. In this paper we describe the AIC, the design decisions behind it, and the types of problems that it contains