Overview
USACO is one of the most challenging pre-college Computer Science Exams/Contests. The USACO holds about five web-based contests during the academic year. Click here to view more details on the timing and exams.
USACO contests are designed to challenge even the very best students, and it can take a good deal of hard work to excel at them. There are four levels: Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum.
Doing well in USACO online contests serves as a good indicator of algorithmic thinking and problem-solving skills.
USACO contests take place as an online exam with a list of open challenges for computer science students every year, with one contest per month from December to April. Visit USACO's official site for details such as the entrance to the IOI. Students can sign up for any of the exams and are encouraged to take as many as you can every year continuously.
The majority of our Algorithms in C/C++ Level II students with high proficiency advanced to Silver. Many of them also advanced to Gold after they reached Level III with high proficiency.
USACO students circle - Practice Group
This is a Students-Driven group which meet once a week to work on USACO problems collaboratively. The meetings are at no cost to SR students. Discussions are led by one of our advanced students. This is NOT a class.
Meeting on Fridays - from 4:30 to 6 PM. First meeting in 2021-Fall: Oct 18th
Prerequisites:
- Algorithms in C/C++ - II - minimum pass the Recursion packet with proficiency; AND
- MUST love problem solving and open discussion; AND
- MUST LOVE PROGRAMMING and algorithmic thinking; AND
- MUST be willing to work through algorithmic problems collaboratively!
If you have met the prerequisites, please email Us to acquire for meeting link.
2021-Fall: Group leader: Arjun Subramanian
Arjun currently is an 8th grader attending Pingry. He has had a deep passion in problem-solving with programming since 6th grade. He earned the USACO Silver level at his 7th grade. He has broadened his CS knowledge by self-studying thru Coursera in various topics including Princeton’s Algorithms (Part
1 and
2),
Managing Big Data with MySQL, and
Algorithms Theory and Machines. He has also taught Python since the 2021 Summer and continues throughout the school year. Some of his other interests include skiing, squash, and play chess.
Here is his GitHub.
2021-Spring: Group leader- Brian Gan.
Brian, a USACO Gold level achiever at 11th grade, has been at SR as both computer science and robotics student since he was in early middle school. He has a deep passion in problem solvings. Brian took the initiative to start this group and hope to further increase the interest and strength in algorithmic programming. ”
Records of Achievements
Advanced to Platnum Division (equivalent to Gold before 2016)
- Daniel Kolano (Gr.11 | Dec/2015)
- Luke Dai (Gr.10 | Feb/2015)
- Ricson Cheng (Gr.11 | Jan/2015)
Advanced to Gold Division
- Brian Gan (Gr.11 | Jan/2021)
- Sophia Chen (Gr.11 | Jan/2021)
- Raj Joshi (Gr.11 | Jan/2020)
- Ethan Wu (Gr.10 | Open/2018)
- Daniel Xue (Gr.9 | Open/2018)
- Sunny Cheng (Gr. 11 | Open/2018)
- Christopher Gu (Gr.9 | Jan/2019)
- Jeffrey Wang (Gr.8 | Open/2018)
- Julian Lee (Gr.9 | Dec/2017)
- Jagdeep Bhatia (Gr.9 | Jan/2017)
- Jeffrey Cheng (Gr.8 | Jan/2017)
- Victor Hu (Gr.9 | Jan/2017)
Advanced to Silver Division
- Arjun Subramanian (Gr. 7 | Dec/2020)
- Neha Vardhaman (Gr.10 | Feb/2020)
- Jonathon Zhang (Gr.10 | Feb/2020)
- Jeffrey Wang (Gr.8 | Open/2018)
- Shaunak Gaiki (Gr.7 | Feb/2018)
- Justin Hong (Gr. 9 | Jan/2018)
- Andrew Dailey (Gr. 8 | Dec/2017)
- Aaron Fan (Gr. 11 | Dec/2017)
- Deep Patel (Gr. 9) | Dec/2017)
- Henry Lin (Gr. 11 | Dec/2017)
- Nathan Yu (Gr. 12 | Dec/2017)
- Sonia Purohit (Gr. 11 | Dec/2017)
- Andrew Krapivin (Gr.10 | Dec/2016)
- Daniel Carroll (Gr.10 | Feb/2017)
- David Xue (Gr.10 | Jan/2017)
- Ethan Mak (Gr.9 | Dec/2016)
- Jared Cheung (Gr.8 | Feb/2017)
- Nikolaj Folmer (Gr.9 | Jan/2017)
- Shikhar Ahuja (Gr.8 | Jan/2017)
- Shruti Roy (Gr.8 | Dec/2016)
- Jeffrey Wang (Gr.7 | Dec/2016)
- Joseph Chen (Gr.9 | Dec/2015)
- Wilson Liou (Gr.9 | Dec/2015)
- Prateek Humane (Gr.8 | Dec/2015)
- Trey Stevens (Gr.11 | Mar/2015)
- Ethan Wu (Gr.7 | Dec/2014)
Computer Science Track
The IDE we use...
Do note that the MS and Eclipse online links do change from time to time. This is out of our control. Therefore, if the link above does not work, you will need to search them online.
Microsoft Visual Studio Community Version.
Download and install the Desktop Development with C/C++.
OR
An online alternative if you use a Mac computer. The debugging tool is completely online, and not nearly as user friendly and powerful comparing to the Visual studio. Here has a couple of very important resources that you should use:
OR
Eclipse IDE
Read this first before you choose Eclipse
Although Eclipse has far smaller footprint, it is more complicated to set up to use with the debugger. Just like most OpenSource software, you might have to manually modify some system configuration. If you are not familiar with simple windows operations such as changing environment variables, navigating thru the windows file system,
do NOT install Eclipse. You should install MS Visual Studio instead.
Install in the following order:
