9/11/25
We are almost halfway through our first round. Welcome to the teams joining for the first time this week! Below is the first update email sent out last week, so you can catch up. A few things we’ve learned in the early days:
Teachers: no need to register more than once as mentioned below. Just have your students create a Kattis account. I can deal with team assignments after they join. The access code when they sign up is 2025.
We have also created two videos for you in our Resources page. One of them has a clue to what’s to come next in a future round.
Once October hits, expect to see shorter rounds. Each round will run for approximately 2 weeks, so there will be two rounds per month until winter break (sometime in December).
We have received some inquiries about Kattis and SOPPA compliance. Please check with your individual districts. We are requesting more info from Kattis, but in general we don’t see this to be an issue. You can always work off of the problem set downloadable on the Resources page.
At month end, we’ll be publishing a teams leaderboard. Please let your colleagues know. The more the merrier!
As always, email us at [email protected] with any questions or concerns!
Congratulations and welcome to the inaugural Illinois computer science tournament! ICST is meant to be a fun learning experience for both us as tournament organizers and yourselves as students. Please be patient as the "paint dries" on our shiny new website. As with anything new, we’re fairly confident you will encounter hiccups along the way. We are all going to learn together as this competition expands in the months ahead.
Please bookmark https://tournament.cs4il.org for any updates. That will be the "source of truth" for any rule or scheduling changes. Expect as the year progresses, the challenges will become more creative and interesting! We also want YOU to submit challenges for other teams to solve, so stay tuned for details.
September Challenge details
As one of the first teams to signup, we wanted our first challenge to run all month, to allow other teams time to get started. As such, you have all month to finish the tasks below.
There will not be any time bonuses, so take your time to get situated.
Our coding problems are being hosted on the Kattis website. Here is the link to our first set of problems:https://cs4il.kattis.com/courses/CS4IL/ICST-Sept
Students: please create a Kattis account with approval from your teacher sponsor. Once you have the account created, you can sign up for that course above. We will assign you to teams if your school has multiple teams, according to your teacher's preferences. Consult with your team sponsor for guidance.
Teachers: if you plan to have multiple teams, you do not need to register on our website more than once. Simply send us a list or spreadsheet to us and we can create the teams for you. We ask that you adhere to the rules (no more than 5 teams, 5 students max per team). You can email the list to: [email protected]