On May 20 the National Programming Olympiad was held in Kazakhstan arranged by the National Chamber of Entrepreneurs of the Republic of Kazakhstan and «Love To Code» Programming School under the support of the Kazakhstan Association of Automation and Robotics, Internet Association of Kazakhstan and Suleiman Demirel University.
23/6/2016 News / Kazakhstan news760 schoolchildren of the 5-6th grades from 14 regions of the country took part in the online Programming Olympiad.
All tasks were presented in an electronic form on the basis of a special virtual platform of the Olympiad. None of the tasks required prior knowledge of any programming languages. Schoolchildren who had no experience in programming could master the skill of coding using CoffeeScript during a training period from May 16 to May 19). Then they had to complete test tasks on the day the Olympiad was held – May 20.
Based on the results of the tasks the «natural interest to programming» index was calculated for all regions of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The main purpose of this index was to identify regions where the most talented children good at programming reside. The index was determined based on the highest average score calculated for each region (simple average performance indicator) provided that over 30 schoolchildren from each region participated in the Olympiad.
The TOP 3 regions with the highest «natural interest to programming» index are the following:
- Kostanay Region (88 points out of 93)
- Akmola Region (76 points out of 93)
- Almaty Region (65 points out of 93)
In addition to this, regions with the largest number of participants were Karaganda Region (51% of participants) Almaty Region (19%) and Pavlodar Region (8%).
29% of schools which took an active part in the Olympiad were the schools from the rural areas of the country. Such schools often had limited number of computers available in IT classrooms and poor Internet connectivity. However, these factors were compensated by active involvement of teachers of such schools in the work. During the post-Olympiad survey 93% of such teachers said they wanted to take part in Programming Olympiads of the following years, and 85% reported they were interested in expansion of the school curriculum on Informatics using additional resources.
The analysis of gender composition of the participants has shown the following: 63% of the participants were the boys, and 37% were the girls. The only region where the number of girls-participants was greater than the boys (51% were girls) was the North Kazakhstan Region. In addition to this, the organizers have revealed that girls are more attentive and self-disciplined during their work on Olympiad tasks and tend to get more scores at the basic levels of the Olympiad, while the boys tend to complete the tasks faster and reach higher levels with more complicated tasks. 48% out of all boys who took part in the Olympiad were able to reach the 25+ levels (out of 30 levels), while only 35% out of all girls-participants reached the same level.
The results of the Olympiad and the Top-list of participants who got the highest scores with a breakdown by cities and towns are available on the website of the Olympiad: https://www.lovetocode.org/olympiada.html