Students from different regions of the country sweep the Chilean Informatics Olympiad 2022
After an extremely challenging year, the National Final of the XI Chilean Informatics Olympiad (OCI), the main computer programming competition in the country, was held on Saturday, November 25, with the participation of 25 students from 7th grade to 4th grade, 35% of whom were girls.
After four hours of competition, the 10 national champions emerged: six Bronze Medals, three Silver Medals and one Gold Medal. The big difference this year was the large presence of students from the regions, who won four of the six distinctions, including the Gold Medal, obtained by Matías Nova, a student from the Liceo Bicentenario de Excelencia Polivalente San Nicolás, in the Ñuble Region.
"I am from Coelemu, a town that is in the Ñuble region, and I had not participated in the OCI before. I found out at the beginning of the year thanks to a friend I met at the Math Olympiads and he prepared me a bit. In addition, I trained the OCI Labs Online workshops", said the national champion.
Demonstrating the increasing participation of women in STEM, three of the nine girls who competed in the national finals won Bronze Medals. "It's very entertaining to meet new women and more dissidents as the years go by in these types of activities, you feel much more accompanied," said Paula Carrión, from Santiago, one of the medalists.
In four hours of competition, students must solve four problems through computer programming, prepared according to the international standards of the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). These can range from efficiently solving distance and time problems to encryption and decryption, among others.
"We are very happy, because we were finally able to return to face-to-face activities and recover one of the most important values of the OCI: that children can meet more people who share their interest in computer programming and live a new experience together", says Federico Meza, an academic at the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María and member of the board of the Chilean Informatics Olympiad. Meza also points out that one of the lessons learned from the pandemic is to have maintained the online workshops, which explains why children from the regions have been able to join the competition together with those who attended regional workshops at the headquarters of different universities throughout the country.
The OCI seeks to awaken early interest in computing and bring computational thinking to students. Its main objective is to discover and empower young talents at an early stage and encourage them to immerse themselves in the world of programming. The initiative is led by the Chilean Society of Computer Science and has the collaboration of the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data. This year it was supported by the companies SOVOS, NTT DATA, CERO, Synopsys, and the Universidad de Concepción.
The 10 winners now make up the National Informatics Selection, a team that will train intensively to choose the four national representatives for the 35th International Informatics Olympiad, to be held in Hungary in 2023.
GOLD MEDAL
Matías Nova Baza, Liceo Bicentenario Polivalente San Nicolás de Ñuble, Region of Ñuble
SILVER MEDALS
Matías Felipe Oteiza Vargas, The Greenland School, Santiago, Metropolitan Region
Javier Ignacio Calfuala Villa, Liceo Bicentenario Padre Alberto Hurtado, Loncoche, La Araucanía Region
Guillermo Andrés Campos Fuentes, Centro Educacional Fernando de Aragón, Puente Alto, Región Metropolitana
BRONZE MEDALS
Paula Antonia Carrión Valdés, The Angels School, Ñuñoa, Metropolitan Region
Sofía Alejandra Muñoz Cordero, Liceo Bicentenario Técnico Las Nieves, Puente Alto, Región Metropolitana
Catalina Monserrat Isabel Díaz Cofré, Liceo N°7 Luisa Saavedra, Providencia, Metropolitan Region
Leandro Manuel Parada Contreras, San Fernando College, San Fernando, O'Higgins Region
Edgardo Antonio León González, Colegio de los Sagrados Corazones de Providencia, Metropolitan Region
Juan Pablo Peñafiel Aguilera, Francis School, Coquimbo, Coquimbo Region