Minutes of the CS Advisory Committee Meeting held August 17, 2007.

 

The UIL CS Advisory committee met in Austin, Texas on August 17, 2007 to discuss various issues of the Computer Science contest.

The following people were in attendance:

The following issues were discussed:

  1. The pilot of a hands on competition at the district level was reviewed.

    In 2007 thirty-eight districts participated in the hands on pilot.

    The breakdown between conferences was 4 A, 8 AA, 7 AAA, 10 AAAA, and 9 AAAAA

    Most districts that ran the pilot reported success in carrying out the contest.

    Many districts only had two or three teams participate.

    The pilot will again be conducted during the 2008 district meets. UIL will contact the District Academic Directors via letter and email this fall to see if they wish to participate in the pilot. The District Academic Directors are responsible for organizing the academic district meet. Computer Science coaches and sponsors are strongly urged to contact the District Academic Directors to request their district 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.

     

  2. Pending a successful outcome of the pilot during the 2007-2008 contest year, the CS contest directors will request a rule change to make the hands on contest an official part of the CS contest at the district level. The rule change would go into effect either the 2008-2009 or 2009-2010 contest year.
     

  3. The issue of advancing teams was discussed. It was suggested by members of the committee that since the contest has two distinct parts, a written part and a hands on part, teams be rewarded for performance in each area. The proposed rule change would advance the team with the best team score on the written exam, the team with the best score on the hands on contest, and the team with the best overall score. Currently only the team with the best overall score advances. The wildcard for the second place team with the highest overall score would remain in effect. Looking at the 2007 regional results this would have resulted in 10 additional teams advancing to the state meet.  The CS contest directors will propose this change to the UIL Legislative committee.

    This rule change was in response to the idea of splitting the hands on and written parts of the contest into two separate contests when and if hands on is included at the district level.
     

  4. Hands on problems will follow the convention of having input files with a ".dat" extension.
     

  5. Possible judging environments for hands on contests were discussed. UIL does not mandate a particular environment. There are three primary options for judging environments:

    A bare bones environment with no automation. Contestants submit solutions (via disk, flash drive, or network) and judges manually compile the solutions, run them, and compare the results to the expected output.

    The UIL judging environment. This is provided to districts and regions on a CD that comes with contest materials. the CD has an installation file that sets up the judging environment. Once installed judges copy contestant submissions to the judging computers and run a batch file that carries out the judging automatically. More information on the UIL provided judging environment can be found at this web page.

    PC^2. From the PC^2 website: "is a software system designed to support programming contest operations in a variety of computing environments. PC^2 allows contestants (teams) to submit programs over a network to contest judges. The judges can optionally recompile the submitted program, execute it, view the source code and/or execution results, and send a response back to the team." Some members of the committee had run invitational contests using this software. Once set up correctly it makes running the contest very easy. Click here to go to the PC^2 web site.
     

  6. Java 6.0 will be the official compiler for the 2008 - 2008 school year.
     

  7. A discussion of providing a standard contest environment for the hands on via a bootable, LiveCD was discussed. This possibility is being investigated further.
     

  8. The topic list was examined. The following changes are being made for the 2007 - 2008 contest year.

    The Boolean exclusive or operator was added.

    The StringBuffer and Random classes were removed. 

    The Stack class, Queue interface, and PriorityQueue class from the Java Standard Library Collections Framework were added.
     

  9. The following changes were made to the Supplemental Reference that is included in the written test.

    Some obvious explanatory remarks were removed.

    The Random class was removed

    The StringBuffer class was removed.

    The Math.random() method was added.

    The addAll, retainAll, and removeAll methods for the Set interface were added.

    Other cosmetic changes were made.
     

  10. The difficulty of the written tests was discussed. Many members felt the tests from 2006-2007 were too difficult for many students. In an attempt to make test easier and encourage participation in the contest the following guidelines:

    The first 15 questions will be more accessible and will generally cover the following topics: Base conversion and arithmetic, simple expressions and variable processing (2 questions), single loops, String manipulation, 1D arrays, Boolean expressions, classes and objects (2 questions), bitwise operators, Math class methods, printf, print and println methods, if and if/else statements, and method calls.

    The last 10 questions of the test will in general be the more difficult questions
     

  11. Minor changes to the hands on contest run sheet and clarification sheets were discussed and will made.