If you are a high school teacher (or other adult representative such as a guidance counselor), and are interested in having your students compete at our tournament, please visit the Registration Page to sign up as a team advisor, or contact Dr. Ali Orooji by phone at 407-823-5660 or through our contact form.

If you are a high school student and are interested in competing, please discuss this with your Computer Science or computer programming teacher (or another teacher or guidance counselor at your high school) and show him/her this web site.

The registration fee supplements the funds covering event expenses, although the fees only cover about 20% of our total costs.

More importantly, it helps us to track which teams will be participating. Before we instituted the fee, we would have teams that would register but not show up, resulting in unnecessary expenses to the tournament.

Team advisors (e.g. teachers), please refer to the email updates you will receive after registration for information on how checks should be made out.

Generally, checks should be mailed to:

Dr. Ali Orooji
Department of Computer Science
4328 Scorpius Street
University of Central Florida
Orlando, FL 32816-2362

If you have questions or need an invoice, please email, call, or use our contact form.

The UCF High School Programming Tournament and the College Board each have scheduling restrictions. Some years the two events do not overlap at all, but in some years they do. When selecting a date for the UCF High School Programming Tournament, we take into account a number of factors including room availability, the UCF academic calendar, and the AP exam schedule. If there is a conflict with the AP exam scehdule, we attempt to choose the best date that does not overlap with exams that we suspect are popular areas (for example, we typically avoid the AP Computer Science, Calculus, and American History exams).

Because we thought you'd like getting a day off from school! Actually, in recent years, we have begun to receive feedback that Saturday might be more convenient than a weekday. We are investigating this possibility, but are constrained by the availability of facilities, university personnel, etc. To voice your opinion, please contact us.

You are certainly welcome. However, it would be advisable to be familiar with one of the official contest languages. Note that you are free to bring books or printouts including language references for use during the contest, if needed.

We have some contest-specific information provided on this web site to help you as well—specifically, examples for program input and output in each language.

Certainly! However, students from each school must be registered and accompanied by a team advisor—a teacher (or official chaperone)—from that high school.

We suggest that you contact a math teacher, a guidance counselor, or possibly a CTE teacher who teaches web design or Information Technology (IT).

Florida Virtual School has participated in our contest several times. A student can choose to participate in their "home" school or for Florida Virtual School (but only one). Please contact your teacher if you are interested.

Yes, we welcome you, but like every team that attends you must cover your travel costs.

If you are unable to attend our prestigious on-site tournament, please consider participating in the UCF High School Programming Tournament: Online Edition.

No. There are many online programming contests, including our own UCF High School Programming Tournament: Online Edition, but the original UCF High School Programming Tournament has always been an on-site event where we can showcase the UCF main campus and our College of Engineering and Computer Science.

Additionally, since we offer substantial prizes for the winning teams, it is important to maintain the integrity of the contest by having the teams come to the campus. It is not practical for us to proctor remote teams, nor to adapt our contest infrastructure to support remote participation.

Unfortunately, travel costs are not within our budget constraints. We do provide meals, prizes and t-shirts!

If you are unable to attend our prestigious on-site tournament, please consider participating in the UCF High School Programming Tournament: Online Edition.

We limit the number of teams per school so that we can accommodate the maximum number of schools. Our registration system should inform you of the current limit. We do our best to provide an adequate computing environment to all teams, but teams registered with lower numbers for a school (e.g. #1, #2) are typically assigned to our best computer labs.

The UCF High School Programming Tournament is modeled after the International Collegiate Programming Contest, which itself is based on teams of three.

We realize that individuals may have very different levels of programming ability, but we think that the dynamics of a team-oriented contest add an exciting dimension to the competition!

Individuals who want to showcase their abilities should participate in the HSPT: Online Edition.

Yes! For example, if your school has 7 interested students, you may choose to have a team of three and 2 teams of two.

Yes. Lunch and dinner are provided. Snacks are provided as well.

Lunch is typically sandwiches, with a vegetarian option available. However, there are a number of food options in the UCF Student Union which you may choose instead, at your own cost.

Dinner is typically pizza including non-meat (cheese only) varieties.

We have been continuously impressed by the talent of high school students attending our competitions! The problems, therefore, contain a variety of difficulty levels.

The students participating in the contest are from different grade levels and different skill levels. The problems, therefore, contain a variety of difficulty levels. Note that ease is a relative term; some may find geometry problems very easy, but not everybody does!

If this is necessary, it is allowed but discouraged. Furthermore, various contest materials (t-shirts, judge solutions and data, etc.) are distributed only after awards have been presented to the winners. Unfortunately, we cannot mail these materials later.

Team T-shirts, final standings printouts, judge data and solutions, and other contest materials are distributed only after awards have been presented to the winners. Unfortunately, we cannot mail these materials later.