The second round of the NZOI competition ran in the last week of June.

Representing Middleton were three of our top programmers from the Year 13 Computer Science class: Jared Tinga, Dean Walker and Nathan Smithies.

Following on from their success in the 1st round back in May, Nathan and Dean again distinguished themselves being placed 2nd and 12th respectively. Nathan managed a perfect score of 750, completing the 3 hour competition in under an hour but was pipped for first place by a few minutes. Dean’s score was only slightly lower at 740. Jared, who is new to Computer Science in 2018, also did remarkably well, finishing in the middle of the field. Nathan and Jared were the team who won the Canterbury Secondary School’s programming contest, also in June.

Apart from fostering informatics and programming in high schools, the New Zealand Olympiad in Informatics provides additional training opportunities to secondary school students who are passionate about programming and computer science. To this end, NZOI runs a training camp for a week each January. Four candidates are selected from this camp to represent NZ in the International Olympiad in Informatics, the foremost high school programming contest in the world.

NZOI hosts preliminary three preliminary rounds throughout the school year. The third and final round will be run in the middle of August. Any pupil interested in participating is encouraged to talk to Mr Baker. Example problems can be found at https://train.nzoi.org.nz – pupils simply create an account to gain access.