An internal competition doesn't choose good programmers, it chooses the
best programmers in the competition. That is why I suggested some
structured training which anyone, even first years, would be able to
attend. Jenny said she would help with things on that side. I presume this
means organise lecturers etc. If we get this happening soon, then we could
organise a competition of our own without being afraid of the engineers.
The competition should be all in C, as that is how the Australian
competition is run. C is easy. You can learn it in a few weeks, at most.
As for programming techniques, you seem to need a knowledge of fundamental
algorithms and data structures - lists, trees, graphs, traversals,
sorting, etc. You also need to be able to predict the running time of your
solution - you don't want to waste time coding, or even designing, an
algorithm that is going to take longer than the lifetime of the universe
to complete.
All these things can be taught in nice small chunks to a group who are
already familiar with programming. Simple implementations of the data
structures can also be taught.
I think we could cover most stuff in 45min-1hour "tutes" once a week, with
extra time set aside for practice coding sessions, etc, in 6-8 weeks.
After which we can start to choose team members.
So, someone needs to talk to Jenny about who is willing to help. Then
ProgSoc should go over past questions and solutions with them and work out
what needs to be mastered, what to teach, when to teach it, etc. There
should definitely be people from ProgSoc involved in organising material -
eg code, examples, even good reference material(Knuth! Knuth! Yay Knuth!)
which can be distributed.
Does that sound like a plan?
Jimmy