Belgian Olympiads in Informatics: the story of launching a national contest

Abstract

This paper describes the story of a new national contest through the experience of Belgium where the first olympiads in informatics were launched in 2010. Belgian Olympiads in Informatics is a multi-stage algorithmic, programming and logic contest composed of both pen-andpaper and on-computer tasks. The great focus on pen-and-paper tasks is a peculiarity of this contest. The context in Belgium is not the most favourable: programming courses at schools are quite rare,there are several official languages but none spoken by the entire population and the government does not give much means for helping organizing such a contest. This paper states how the contest was launched, explains the motivations behind the structure of the contest, the kind of tasks, the national delegation selection process and the training of the contestants