The limitations caused by the coronavirus pandemic affected International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) among students’ teams during the last two seasons. Therefore, only in the end of 2022 the finals of the season 2020/21 took place in Dacca, the capital and largest city of Bangladesh. That was one of the finals in which ISTU team participated.

Coming back from the trip, Head of Center for Training Programmers of Olympic Reserve Prof. Vladimir Tarasov shared:

— All in all, 130 teams took part in the contest, ISTU team took the 79th place, having solved 3 out of 12 problems. It should be pointed out that the contest cannot be called successful for Russian teams (they were 11): only 2 medals were won, the best result – National Research University “Higher School of Economics” (9th place, bronze medal). The acknowledged leaders of our country (Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, St. Petersburg University, ITMO University) performed unsuccessfully in comparison with the previous years. First of all, this can be explained by organizational reasons: the contest took place with delay, many team members have already graduated, they are working somewhere, there are no joint trainings. It was not clear for a long time who got into the finals. There are also no superstars, such as Pert Mitrichev or Gennady Korotkevich, among the students as in the previous years. But everything can change, so I don’t see any reasons for self-chastise.

Bangladesh as the place for ICPC finals was selected based on the competition taking into account many parameters. Several ministers of the country (informatization, economy) took part in the opening and closing ceremonies of the contest. The Bangladesh team demonstrated quite successful result – it was in the middle of the final table, somewhere near us.

Today our hopes are connected with those teams, which have successfully performed in Yekaterinburg recently and won qualifying places in quarterfinals of the season 2022-23. It will take place in Saint-Petersburg from 6 till 8 December.

I came from Bangladesh with such opinion and mood that it is necessary to change the attitude to trainings, improve the motivation for teams to participate to win medals. The motivation must be on the same level as in 2008 when our team (А. Skidanov, Е. Kuzyakov, V. Kamashev) went to take part in the finals to win medals. Today we should definitely move to the next stage of educational and training work; do our best for the problems, which are difficult for students today, to be average. Active coaches taking part in professional tournaments are required. We need the coaching staff, and I’ve been talking about it for several years already. We that there is understanding of these tasks from Head of Software Department Mikhail Leonov, Director of Institute of Informatics and Computer Engineering Igor Arkhipov and Acting Rector Aleksandr Gubert. Just one small thing is lacking: to convince the participants of our best teams of previous years to work with young people, deal with complex coach’s pedagogical work, at the same time providing the “average” salary of a programmer in a computer company.