Purpose of the blog is that how people feel about possibility of Div 1 Educational Rounds.
Many people really like Educational Rounds. As these rounds include more conceptual problems rather than ad-hoc or some difficult pattern observation problems. Now a days most of Div 2 educational rounds have only (F,G) time taking or some thinking, other problems are too standard.
So I think if there are majority of people also who like this idea admins can consider Div 1 Educational rounds also. :)
Tagging some people to hear some view about this. BledDest awoo vovuh adedalic
Educational rounds have more standard problems. In fact, oftentimes, these problems can be googled. It's mostly some nice introductory problems about some "advanced" data structures or a standard technique.
I don't think a Div 1 could be educational because most (maybe all) of the Div. 1 people know the standard tricks and techniques.
I am considering people of of rating about 2000-2200. There are many people in this range who have much scope of learning topics like Dp optimisations, FFT, Flows questions , Advanced Graph and data structures, Strings and much more... People can became yellow on cf now without knowing these techniques. So it would beneficial if they have these problems in contest then they can be motivated to learn these things.
I have to disagree. I really don't want codeforces to become template wars. Competitive programming should be(I think) about thinking and coming up with new interesting ideas instead of memorizing as many algorithms and data structures as possible.
Current educational rounds are really good. They are not something like template war. Those include some really nice conceptual problems in which you have to think many times not just copy paste then how are you considering that they will be just about memorizing things.
I think I am too stupid to set Div1E level problems, so it will be quite hard to give regular Div1 ERs. But maybe we'll do it some time.
By the way, I don't think it's a bad thing that people can reach 2000+ rating without knowing advanced topics. Don't know about other regions, but in NERC region of ICPC the problems mostly don't require anything really complicated in terms of algorithms/data structures (they compensate it with not-so-easy solution ideas, though). If I remember correctly, in most official ICPC contests where my team performed badly it wasn't because we didn't know some complex topic, it was because we couldn't solve a non-standard idea on a simple topic (and I try to make ERs suitable to prepare for ICPC contests).