What is a student of grade 10-11 capable of and about the future of the IT community in our country
I greet the respected Habr IT community!
Spend 30 seconds of your time and ponder the names of these projects:
All this is the scientific projects of Russian students in grades 10-11.
It is not easy to believe it right away, but it is.
In this post I want to tell:
We have competitions in our country that help talented students to reach their potential and support work on similar projects.
One of such competitions was already mentioned on Habré - this is the Baltic scientific and engineering competition .
The event annually gathers more than 300 schoolchildren from all over Russia in St. Petersburg and is the qualifying stage for the Intel ISEF international competition for young scientists in the USA, which is very cool .
In this post, we will focus on the Baltic Competition. Of course, today in grades 10-11, a student can participate in a huge number of various competitions, contests and competitions. To understand why the Baltic competition is worthy of a separate post on Habré, it is enough to look at examples of projects of past years:
In this project, a 10th grade student ...
Presentation of the project for the competition in Russia:
Project stand at the Intel ISEF international exhibition: (click to enlarge) Report about the student in the news:
In this project, a 11th grade student ...
Project stand for the contest in Russia: (click to enlarge the picture) Project stand at the Intel ISEF international exhibition: (click to enlarge the picture)
In this project, a 11th grade student ...
Project stand at the Intel ISEF international exhibition: (click to enlarge the picture)
The above 3 projects were selected only because I am familiar with the students who did these projects. (By the way, “schoolchildren”, of course, have not been schoolchildren for a long time. By the time this post was written, one “schoolboy” had already created from scratch an IT company developing a software product in St. Petersburg that surpasses all available European counterparts and is already sold in the CIS and three European countries). Well, of course, it was quite serious Computer Science projects that could be of interest to the Habra community were chosen.
The Baltic competition presents projects not only in the Computer Science section and not only of a similar level of complexity. At the competition you can find both an “English-language simulator application for children on flash” from a 9th grader from the village of Baranovichi, and a “universal distributed password cracker” from an 11th grade student from St. Petersburg (By the way, this “schoolboy” is no longer a schoolboy too : in my humble opinion, is one of Peter’s coolest experts in computer security and writes such useful articles on Habré ).
In addition to Computer Science, in other sections you can find a lot of strong work - here, for example, a few names from last year:
Examples of other projects:
The list of works by winners of the 2013 competition can be found here .
Here you can see an excellent report from the 2010 contest with examples of projects and photos.
Baltic Competition - All-Russian. For schoolchildren from the province, the opportunity to speak to the scientific jury and chat with like-minded people is especially relevant, since these guys have practically no such opportunities at home. Payment of travel to St. Petersburg and accommodation for many families is a significant problem.
For this reason, the contest organizers decided to take on such expenses. (the organizer of the competition is one of the mathematical schools in St. Petersburg )
In any normal country, of course, such events should be sponsored by the state.
Alas, in 2014 the Baltic Competition did not receive financial support from Russian officials.
In short, the “algorithm” is something like this:
There is a conditional Ivan Ivanov, a 10th grade student from the city of Chelyabinsk.
While all of Ivan’s friends are playing World Of Tanks or drinking beer in the porch, Ivan became interested in programming and wants to develop a modification of Dalvik VM to make debugging Android applications more convenient.
Ivan wants to go to St. Petersburg for a contest so that the result of his sleepless nights is appreciated by professionals in the IT industry, but his family does not have an extra 10,000 rubles to secure a trip.
Today, alas, our officials are not ready to help Ivan.
It is extremely important to understand the fundamental difference between the Baltic Competition and others like it from all kinds of programming contests.
At the programming olympiads:
At the Baltic competition:
No no! Olympics are good too. A science project is just another.
Why is this “other” important to us? About it further.
I think many community members have a dream of a “bright future”, in which the country where we were born and wrote our first Hello World is not a “raw materials appendage”, but a world leader in innovative developments. When more than 50% of techcranch posts are not about Silicon Valley offices, but about our startups.
There is no doubt that the main component of success for such a “bright future” is companies that are developing something new and something complex . In turn, for such companies to exist, people are needed who are able to develop something new and something complicated.
Competitions such as the Baltic - just about that!
Just imagine two first year students. One in the 11th grade trained on hundreds of Olympiad problems, and the other at that time was doing one major project for the Baltic competition.
Which of the two students would you take for an internship in a pilot innovative project in your company?
Which of the two students is more likely to become CTO in the very “next Google” whose appearance we are all waiting for?
I think the answer is obvious.
Real software projects that change the world around us are, as a rule, not olympiad tasks where you need to code something in 10 minutes in an emergency mode. In real projects, we spend hours studying the specifications, thinking through a complex architecture, understanding other people's code, etc.
Is it important for our IT community to pay attention to contests in which specialists are born who are good at creating something new and complex?
In my opinion, just a must. Otherwise, one day we will wake up and find that all 50 candidates for the vacancy for our super-project-which-must-change-world are capable of only something primitive and one-way. And then we all run together todry crackers to write such posts on Habré about "personnel shortage" .
If a respected member of the Habr IT community reading this post agrees with this statement, for him I’ll just leave a link here to the project’s crowdfunding page, where one of these contests can be supported until January 16. (by the way, this post is in the crowdfunding hub, which, in theory, allows you to place such a link)
I want to finish on a positive note.
1. Who is from St. Petersburg - February 5, 2014 at 16-00 come to the Exchange line house 6 to see the projects of schoolchildren at the Baltic Competition. Believe me, it’s VERY important for schoolchildren that YOU evaluate their work and give feedback.
2. I really hope that what is written in my post will resonate with the respected Habr community and together we will build a country in which the conditional Ivan from Chelyabinsk will become the basis of that “bright future” in which our country is respected as a world leader in innovative IT-developments .
It will not be so easy, but "going will overcome the road."
Well, here's the last motivating photo of the author of one of the projects that were discussed at the beginning of the post:
(photo taken in the USA during the final of the Intel ISEF competition)
Spend 30 seconds of your time and ponder the names of these projects:
- Contract Shared Memory Technology on Microsoft Singularity OS
- Back-In-Time Debugger: debugger for Linux with the ability to restore the previous state of the debugged program
- Modification of Dalvik VM for beta testing Android applications with the ability to play custom actions
All this is the scientific projects of Russian students in grades 10-11.
It is not easy to believe it right away, but it is.
In this post I want to tell:
- where do schoolchildren with such projects come from in Russia and where you can see all such projects;
- how, in my opinion, the future of the IT community in our country depends on all this;
- what every member of this community can do to make this future the way we want to see it.
About one good competition of scientific projects for schoolchildren
We have competitions in our country that help talented students to reach their potential and support work on similar projects.
One of such competitions was already mentioned on Habré - this is the Baltic scientific and engineering competition .
The event annually gathers more than 300 schoolchildren from all over Russia in St. Petersburg and is the qualifying stage for the Intel ISEF international competition for young scientists in the USA, which is very cool .
In this post, we will focus on the Baltic Competition. Of course, today in grades 10-11, a student can participate in a huge number of various competitions, contests and competitions. To understand why the Baltic competition is worthy of a separate post on Habré, it is enough to look at examples of projects of past years:
Project Example 1: Contract Shared Memory Technology in Microsoft Singularity OS
In this project, a 10th grade student ...
- Took Microsoft Singularity, Microsoft's experimental OS
- Analyzed system performance for some tasks
- Suggested a more efficient way to work with memory
- Implemented this, conducted tests, summed up
- He presented work at the Baltic Competition, won a trip to America.
- He represented Russia in America at the Intel ISEF international competition, became the winner (2nd place).
Presentation of the project for the competition in Russia:
Project stand at the Intel ISEF international exhibition: (click to enlarge) Report about the student in the news:
Project Example 2: Back-In-Time Debugger: a debugger for Linux with the ability to restore the previous state of a debugged program
In this project, a 11th grade student ...
- When developing the just4fun toy in C ++, I realized all the “charms” of software debugging. Especially those moments when the cause of the error is somewhere around 10,000 lines to the place where the problem actually appeared. (for example, the memory was “beaten” 3 minutes ago, and Segmentation Fault occurred only now, when they tried to access the beaten memory)
- I came up with a debugger with the ability to roll back the program to a previous state and thus learn how to easily fix difficult to reproduce bugs.
- Took the source code of the open source GDB debugger . Assembled under Cygwin.
- For 6 (!) Months, unsuccessfully tried to implement a venture from under Windows.
- After 6 months, I decided to try to do it under Linux. Instruments were inserted into the executable code of the program in the memory of the debugged process "on the fly", including calling the fork () process cloning system function . Cloning the program process allowed you to save the state of the program and roll it back.
- Made a customized version of GDB with additional functions such as “restore program state”, posted the code on SourceForge .
- He presented work at the Baltic Competition, won a trip to America.
- He represented Russia in America at the Intel ISEF international competition, became the winner (4th place).
Project stand for the contest in Russia: (click to enlarge the picture) Project stand at the Intel ISEF international exhibition: (click to enlarge the picture)
Project Example No. 3: Modification of Dalvik VM for beta testing Android applications with the ability to play custom actions
In this project, a 11th grade student ...
- For the sake of interest, he began to develop mobile applications for Android
- In the development process, I encountered a problem that if one of the friends playing with the application suddenly crashes, the situation is sometimes difficult to reproduce and you can’t use the debugger.
- Inspired by a compatriot project about Back-In-Time debugger. I decided to do something similar for Android applications.
- He made a modification of Dalvik VM (the java virtual machine used in Android), in which a code recording system events and user actions is automatically inserted into the bytecode of the tested application.
- Developed a “player”, which allows you to “lose” the life of the application that turned out with the beta tester using the special log file created in this way. In this case, of course, it is possible to use a debugger.
- He presented work at the Baltic Competition, won a trip to America.
- He represented Russia in America at the Intel ISEF international competition. He did not win the main prize, but received good prizes.
Project stand at the Intel ISEF international exhibition: (click to enlarge the picture)
Other projects
The above 3 projects were selected only because I am familiar with the students who did these projects. (By the way, “schoolchildren”, of course, have not been schoolchildren for a long time. By the time this post was written, one “schoolboy” had already created from scratch an IT company developing a software product in St. Petersburg that surpasses all available European counterparts and is already sold in the CIS and three European countries). Well, of course, it was quite serious Computer Science projects that could be of interest to the Habra community were chosen.
The Baltic competition presents projects not only in the Computer Science section and not only of a similar level of complexity. At the competition you can find both an “English-language simulator application for children on flash” from a 9th grader from the village of Baranovichi, and a “universal distributed password cracker” from an 11th grade student from St. Petersburg (By the way, this “schoolboy” is no longer a schoolboy too : in my humble opinion, is one of Peter’s coolest experts in computer security and writes such useful articles on Habré ).
In addition to Computer Science, in other sections you can find a lot of strong work - here, for example, a few names from last year:
Examples of other projects:
- Yoneda Algebra of one of the special atomic algebras
- A new type of layered double nickel hydroxide for use in hybrid supercapacitors
- Cohomology of p-groups of manual type of representations
- Study of the methods for selection of Mytilus Edulis and Mytilus Trossulus mussels with magpie (Haemotopys Ostralegus) mussels of species in the Kandalaksha reserve of Ryazhkov island
- Synthesis of a steroid hormone analogue containing fluorine at position 2
The list of works by winners of the 2013 competition can be found here .
Here you can see an excellent report from the 2010 contest with examples of projects and photos.
A small spoon A couple of barrels of tar about financing the competition, which I just can not help but say
Baltic Competition - All-Russian. For schoolchildren from the province, the opportunity to speak to the scientific jury and chat with like-minded people is especially relevant, since these guys have practically no such opportunities at home. Payment of travel to St. Petersburg and accommodation for many families is a significant problem.
For this reason, the contest organizers decided to take on such expenses. (the organizer of the competition is one of the mathematical schools in St. Petersburg )
In any normal country, of course, such events should be sponsored by the state.
Alas, in 2014 the Baltic Competition did not receive financial support from Russian officials.
In short, the “algorithm” is something like this:
- Science Committee does not deal with schoolchildren
- Education Committee not doing science
- The Committee on Youth Policy does not deal with science or schoolchildren, their path is entertaining
- Governor redirects letters to Science Committee again
- goto 1
There is a conditional Ivan Ivanov, a 10th grade student from the city of Chelyabinsk.
While all of Ivan’s friends are playing World Of Tanks or drinking beer in the porch, Ivan became interested in programming and wants to develop a modification of Dalvik VM to make debugging Android applications more convenient.
Ivan wants to go to St. Petersburg for a contest so that the result of his sleepless nights is appreciated by professionals in the IT industry, but his family does not have an extra 10,000 rubles to secure a trip.
Today, alas, our officials are not ready to help Ivan.
Specificity of scientific projects, unlike programming olympiads
It is extremely important to understand the fundamental difference between the Baltic Competition and others like it from all kinds of programming contests.
At the programming olympiads:
- The problem is given, which is already 100% solved before you by "smart uncles";
- The problem must be solved in 10 minutes, the student must think very quickly, quickly "put out the fires";
- The quality of the code does not matter. The main thing is to send the file with the task for verification (well, the one that is “task3NewNewNewFinallyWorks.cpp”) and get the cherished “Accepted”;
- Only the basic elements of the language are used: arrays, strings, a pair of standard algorithms.
At the Baltic competition:
- The problem with an "open end" is given. No one really knows what will turn out in the end and whether it will work out at all;
- The problem cannot be solved in 10 minutes. The task is difficult and, as a rule, a year is done;
- The result of the work of the student is a fully-functional software product. A schoolboy is forced to learn to write the project code correctly, to think through architecture correctly;
- A schoolboy smokes 1000 mans to understand complex technologies, and in 90% of cases all this is in English.
No no! Olympics are good too. A science project is just another.
Why is this “other” important to us? About it further.
About the future of the IT community in our country
I think many community members have a dream of a “bright future”, in which the country where we were born and wrote our first Hello World is not a “raw materials appendage”, but a world leader in innovative developments. When more than 50% of techcranch posts are not about Silicon Valley offices, but about our startups.
There is no doubt that the main component of success for such a “bright future” is companies that are developing something new and something complex . In turn, for such companies to exist, people are needed who are able to develop something new and something complicated.
Competitions such as the Baltic - just about that!
Just imagine two first year students. One in the 11th grade trained on hundreds of Olympiad problems, and the other at that time was doing one major project for the Baltic competition.
Which of the two students would you take for an internship in a pilot innovative project in your company?
Which of the two students is more likely to become CTO in the very “next Google” whose appearance we are all waiting for?
I think the answer is obvious.
Real software projects that change the world around us are, as a rule, not olympiad tasks where you need to code something in 10 minutes in an emergency mode. In real projects, we spend hours studying the specifications, thinking through a complex architecture, understanding other people's code, etc.
Is it important for our IT community to pay attention to contests in which specialists are born who are good at creating something new and complex?
In my opinion, just a must. Otherwise, one day we will wake up and find that all 50 candidates for the vacancy for our super-project-which-must-change-world are capable of only something primitive and one-way. And then we all run together to
If a respected member of the Habr IT community reading this post agrees with this statement, for him I’ll just leave a link here to the project’s crowdfunding page, where one of these contests can be supported until January 16. (by the way, this post is in the crowdfunding hub, which, in theory, allows you to place such a link)
Everything will be fine!
I want to finish on a positive note.
1. Who is from St. Petersburg - February 5, 2014 at 16-00 come to the Exchange line house 6 to see the projects of schoolchildren at the Baltic Competition. Believe me, it’s VERY important for schoolchildren that YOU evaluate their work and give feedback.
2. I really hope that what is written in my post will resonate with the respected Habr community and together we will build a country in which the conditional Ivan from Chelyabinsk will become the basis of that “bright future” in which our country is respected as a world leader in innovative IT-developments .
It will not be so easy, but "going will overcome the road."
Well, here's the last motivating photo of the author of one of the projects that were discussed at the beginning of the post:
(photo taken in the USA during the final of the Intel ISEF competition)