In August, Insight@UCC’s Andrea Visentin and Federico Toffano acted as Team Leader and Deputy of the Ireland’s team for the 31^st International Olympiad in Informatics. Ireland’s team members were Kieran Hogan, Andrew Nash, Caolan Fleming, and Oisin Davey.

The Olympiad took place in Baku, Azerbaijan from 4 to 11 August. 88 nations selected their best 4 students to compete, the selection process involved half a million students in the world. It is the biggest scientific olympiad after the mathematic one.  In July, Insight volunteers assisted the School of Computer Science and Information Technology in the training camp for the Irish Team and honed their programming skills, hoping to improve last year results. Each day of training they had a specific topic: Dynamic Programming, Indexation, Trees and Binary search, Graphs and Competition Hints/Strategies.

The All Ireland Programming Olympiad is the most important Irish coding competition for secondary school students. The winners are selected to represent Ireland at the International Olympiad of Informatics (IOI). This was the first time team selection was done in UCC.

It was a successful trip. In a competition dominated by China, USA and Russia, Kieran Hoganscored a Bronze medal and the others performed well.