Israel: The regional competition and teacher involvement

During the last year, the Israeli ministry of education increased its support to the Israeli IOI project. The primary goals of the increased support were to expose the project to a wider audience of high school students and to expand the team selection and training process. The team selection process involves several stages. The two early stages are: students' early preparation and a regional competition. We present here several questions of the regional competition, which require only numeric answers without algorithms or explanations. We then display the results of a survey, conducted among our high-school teachers, of their attitudes and involvement in the project's early stages. The results shed light on the teachers' views of the project's regional competition, task characteristics, school selection, student preparation, and more.