Hey all,

As always, we hope you’re doing well. We’re reaching out to announce that we’re now opening sign ups for UFDS 2023. This program is designed to train students for ZCO, INOI and IOITC. If you're a school student in India, this post could be of interest to you. Last year, we had all 10 gold medallists, 16 silver medallists and 17 bronze medallists at the INOI present in our server. Part of the program is to surround you with others who will attempt the contest, so you can all help each other.

Like last year (and the year before), if you join the program, we’ll help you by:

• Compiling useful practice problem sets to introduce you to a variety of different techniques
• Selecting problems to practice with
• Providing hints to solve problems in practice
• Discussing problems after a contest
• Recommending similar problems (if you’d like to reinforce a trick/observation)
• Providing debugging assistance
• Finding tutorials for classical techniques
• Hosting sessions to teach/discuss classical techniques (we now have a list of topics we’d like to cover in order, but we’re usually also happy to teach other things as necessary)
• Hosting sessions to teach/discuss specific problems

Most importantly, joining the server gives you access to sample ZCO and INOI sets for you to practice on. The majority of participants rate this as the most important element of their preparation.

One of the biggest issues with ZCO preparation is the extremely large gap between learning a programming language and qualifying through ZCO. This year, there is a separate program designed specifically for ZCO, instead of a combined program. Our hope is that this will better serve students struggling to qualify through ZCO. The only criteria for this program is that you understand any programming language (ideally C++, since all instruction will be in C++). You will be given some resources and a couple of weeks to learn C++, although no sessions will be offered on this.

After ZCO, more personalised mentoring for INOI and IOITC will be offered to students in the program who demonstrate an extraordinary level of effort, achievement and willingness to help others during the ZCO preparation process.

If you’re interested in joining, please fill out this form. You will obtain the invite link immediately, but please note that you will only be given roles to view the server once your form submission has been reviewed and approved. In particular, UFDS 2023 is only open to students intending to participate in ZIO, ZCO, INOI and IOITC in 2023, although there is no criteria on having attended or not attended past versions of ICO and UFDS. If you have any questions, please message ak2006 on Codeforces or Discord (ak2006#5194).

Mentors this year include kshitij_sodani aryan12 smjleo arujbansal vishesh312 niloyroot ak2006 VivaanGupta mynameismon. To be clear, these mentors have qualified for IOITC at least once and/or are INOI medallists (with the exception of a few in charge of the overall structure and our website). Also, the mentors listed are mostly involved with the ZCO part of the program for now, which is the first stage of the olympiad. For the INOI part, we will most likely have a somewhat different set of highly qualified mentors.

Regards,

UFDS Mentoring 2023 Team