Supervisor's Guide

The contest will last for three hours, to be held in a single block. All students at the school must sit the contest at the same time.

The contest must begin between 9am and 5pm inclusive, on the contest day, Australian Eastern Standard Time. For instance, the contest may be held from 3 pm till 6 pm, but not from 5.30 pm till 8.30 pm.

If you are in a non-Australian timezone, please contact us and let us know when you will start the contest.

Before the contest

• On the morning of the contest day, the registering teacher can log into the registration site (https://competitions.amt.edu.au/admin/), download the contest papers, and print physical copies. Students must not read the contest papers before they have started the contest.
• Before the contest begins, confirm that all students do not have any forbidden materials, and are aware of which sites they may and may not access during the contest (as outlined on the Contest Environment page).

Starting the contest

• To start the contest, teachers should instruct students to log into the contest system (at http://aio.edu.au/contest) with their login details. Students should not press the "Start!" button until all students are logged in and ready to begin.
• Once started, students can download the contest paper and begin working (or open the printed paper, if they have been provided one).

During the contest

• Supervisors should do their best to ensure students adhere to the contest rules.
• Supervisors should not assist students with programming related matters (e.g. "how do I write a for-loop?", "why is my code crashing?")
• Supervisors may assist students with technical matters (e.g. "I can't access the contest site", "How much time is left?")
• Supervisors may wish to give a warning at 15 minutes, and 5 minutes left to make sure students remember to submit their code before the contest ends.

After the contest

• Students must not discuss the problems in public forums/discussions until the morning of Saturday 31 August 2024.
• When the results are finalised by the judges, students will be able to log back into the contest system to see their final scores.

Local technical issues

In the event of any technical failures, students should do their best to continue working on the contest. No extra time will be awarded for technical failures outside the control of the contest organisers (e.g. computer freezes, internet cuts out, rogue siblings).

Contest site failures

In the event of a contest website failure (e.g. the website goes down), students should continue to work on the problems on their local computers. Although judging feedback is unavailable, students are still able to write code in their text editors or IDEs, or work on solving the problems on paper.

Once the issue has been resolved, extra time may be awarded to students who were adversely affected. To request extra time, the student should send a clarification detailing how they were affected by the technical failure, and the amount of extra time they are requesting.

If the three-hour contest window ends before the technical issues are resolved, students should send a copy of their work to their supervising teacher, who should send it to aioquery@amt.edu.au.