International Olympiad in Informatics: Team selection, training, and statistics - The tale of two countries

The paper discusses the issue of supporting informatics (mainly focusing on programming) education through competitions for secondary school students. Competitions play an important role for learners as a source of inspiration, innovation, and attraction. The International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) is the primary computer science competition for young students, up to the age of 20. The primary goals of the IOI are to stimulate challenges in Informatics among exceptionally talented young students from all over the world, and have them share scientific and cultural experiences. We describe the selection and training process in Israel and Lithuania. An overview of infrastructure and development of competitions from international and regional levels to the national one (Israeli and Lithuanian) is presented in short. In addition we provide some statistics from the years 2010 to 2014, such as: Israeli and Lithuanian medals, number of participants in the different stages of the training process, and age and gender distribution of contestants in the National contests. We conclude with a discussion comparing the IOI projects in both countries.