The Ateneo Summer Programming Camp for Teachers (ASPC-T), made possible by a grant from Google, Inc., was a two-week, whole-day training seminar for high school teachers organized by the Department of Information Systems and Computer Science of the Ateneo de Manila University. It aims to teach high school teachers about competitive programming using the C++ programming language and to equip them with the knowledge and skills to teach their own students. The culminating activity of the camp was a programming contest. A total of 32 high school teachers were awarded their certificates of participation.
Competitive programming refers to problem solving with a computer language such as Java or C++. By the end of the course, participants were able to:
- Read and analyze a word problem
- Construct a space- or time-efficient solution to the problem
- Implement the solution using a computer language
- Debug the solution
- Install and test a competitive programming environment
Each lesson was comprised of a lecture, conducted by invited professors and alumni of Ateneo de Manila University or Ateneo de Naga University. Lectures were followed by individual hands-on sessions and a discussion of solutions. Some days had extended hands-on sessions in the afternoons, while some days had another lecture session instead.
The following topics were covered during the camp:
- Introduction to C++ and Control Structures
- Arrays and Strings
- Functions and Classes
- Recursion and Built-in Libraries
- Brute Force, Backtracking, and Dynamic Programming
- Combinatorics
- Introduction to Graphs and Shortest Paths
Prizes for the contest winners were provided by the Ateneo Laboratory for the Learning Sciences and the Computer Society of the Ateneo.
