Older Materials and Announcements
April 28, 2009: Here are the regional files for programming and written. This includes the corrected versionf of Let's Make a Deal:
April 7, 2009: I am posting the district materials to help teams prepare for regionals.
November 5, 2008: The addition of programming at district passed at the UIL Legislative Council meeting in October. All that remains now is for the education commissioner to sign off on it (as is required for all UIL rule changes), but that is just a formality. So district programming is set to become official for 2009-10. The UIL CS advisory council will likely meet summer 2009 to discuss the details of the programming portion of the contest at districts.
The University of Texas has updated its listserv software. To sign up for the listserv:
Posted the 2008-2009 topic list. There are no changes from last year.
May 5, 2008: Posted the State written exam in pdf format and the material from the hands on portion of the state contest in zip format.
April 14, 2008: Here are the 2008 regional materials. (zip file format) The zip file contains the written test, hands on problem statements, hands on sample data and expected output, hands on judging data and expected output, and suggested solutions.
The judging data for the Goldbach problem requires the
addition of data for primes that are the sum of two equal primes. For
example 34 = 17 + 17 is part of the output. The suggested solution to this
problem should be changed so the for loop test is i <= limit.
On the bongo problem the spaces between letters and numbers on the 7th and 8th data sets should be removed.
March 31, 2008: Per the UIL CS advisory council request I am posting all of the district materials to help teams prepare for regionals.
I have also gotten several requests for the 2007 regional hands on materials. I apologize these were not posted earlier.
March 17, 2008: I have posted this year's dry run problem. It is essentially the same as year's past. The purpose of the dry run is a communications check of the contestants' systems and the judging systems. Teams may have the dry run solution preloaded on their machines but need to delete it after the dry run, before the actual contest starts. Here is the dry run problem description(pdf format), the input file, the expected output, and a suggested solution.
September 28, 2007: The original practice test had errors on questions 22 and 25. I have posted a corrected version. Thanks to Charlotte Scroggs for finding the errors!
August 27, 2007: Posted the 2007 - 2008 topic list, supplemental class reference, a practice test and a commentary on the practice test. All files are pdf format.
August 21, 2007: UIL will again be conducting a pilot of the hands on programming portion of the Computer Science contest at the district level during the 2007 - 2008 contest year. Computer Science coaches as sponsors are urged to contact their UIL District Academic Directors to agree to participate in the pilot. UIL will be contacting the UIL District Academic Directors via letter and email this fall to offer them them opportunity for their district to participate in the pilot.
There will be a third Computer Science Session at the UIL Student Activities Conferences this fall to demonstrate how to run and judge a hands on contest. This session is designed for contestants, CS sponsors and coaches, and school UIL coordinators.
Posted the minutes from the UIL CS Advisory Committee meeting which took place on August 17, 2007.
May 7, 2007: The 2007 State contest hands on data. (Problem statements, input files, output files, and sample solutions.) are now available.
Materials from the 2007 regional hands on contest
Updated Topics List for 2006 - 2007(pdf file) Note, Java version 5.0 (a.k.a. version 1.5.0) is the official version of Java for the 2006-2007 Computer Science Contest
Class Reference Sheet for 2006 - 2007
Slides from my presentation at the Fall 2006 UIL Student Activity Conferences
Programming example from the 2006 Student Activity Conferences, letter frequency problem.
Programming example from the 2005 Student Activity Conferences, brain wave problem
Programming example from 2005 Student Activity Conferences, juggling problem