Computational Thinking Olympiad
2nd Semi-Annual Computational Thinking Olympiad
Saturday, April 14th, 2012
9am – 4pm
Competition Theme: Algorithms & Encoding and Decoding Data
Students will rotate through 5 challenging competition activities while learning to
develop algorithms to solve problems and how to encode and decode images and
massages and the various types of networks that carry these messages. Teams
will be earn points towards medals for each activity and for the overall
competition award. This promises to be a fun and engaging day of physical and
mental competition to see who can be the ultimate Computational Thinking
Olympians.
Competition Schedule
Saturday, April 14, 2012
9:00am - 10:00pm - Check-in
10:00am - 10:30am - Welcome
10:30am - 10:45am - Transition to competition rooms
10:45am - 11:30am - Activity #1
11:30am - 12:15pm - Activity #2
12:15pm - 1:00pm - Lunch
1:00pm - 1:45pm - Activity #3
1:45pm - 2:30pm - Activity #4
2:30pm - 3:15pm - Activity #5
3:15pm - 4:00pm - Closing and Awards Presentation
CTO Website: http://home.cc.gatech.edu/cmgardne/80
Contact: Christina M. Gardner, PhD - Christina.Gardner@gatech.edu
Office of Outreach, Enrollment, & Community at GA Tech’s College of Computing
Computational Thinking Olympiad
Description of Activities
CTO-Bot – Anyone, up for a cross-country run? We’ll in this competition, the speed of your feet
won’t be the only thing racing. In this activity, students will interactively develop
algorithms/sets of instructions using our special instruction blocks and CTO-bot interface to
navigate their team members through several challenging mazes and courses faster than their
competitors.
Towers of Hanoi – Next, students will lift a series of swimming inner tubes to develop a solution
to the historical Towers of Hanoi problem. We will see who has the mental strength to
repeatedly lift and coordinate the intricate pattern needed to complete our Olympic weight
lifting challenge.
Image-Relay – As the day progress, students will have to opportunity to put their feet to floor
running again as they encode images and carry these encoded bits of images across the
internet network to ensure their safe arrival and accurate decoding into a copy of the original
image on the other side of the network. As the title suggests, this is our Olympic Relay event so
teams will need to work collaboratively to ensure that every baton/bit pass-off is a success.
Bit-Watch – In this, high speed ping pong competition, students will get a closer look at the
high-speed transmission of messages across a network as they scramble to encode messages,
send them over the network, and decode them. If this isn’t challenging enough they will do this
while trying to avoid having their data stolen by other teams lurking on their network. This is
not your traditional ping pong competition but these small colored balls will be flying across the
room in our re-stylized Ping Pong competition.
River-crossing – Every good summer Olympic competition always takes on the raging waters of
the river in Sailing. For this event, students will devise algorithms to safely transport passengers
from one side of the river to solve various river crossing problems.
CTO Website: http://home.cc.gatech.edu/cmgardne/80
Contact: Christina M. Gardner, PhD - Christina.Gardner@gatech.edu
Office of Outreach, Enrollment, & Community at GA Tech’s College of Computing