How to create a Team for coding competitions

Competitive Programming

This guide will help on why and how you create a team to participate in programming competitions.

This guide is divided in:

Why create a team?

Teams are a great way to keep yourself motivated. Learn and training with a group of friends will definitely make you go further. Usually, teams for programming competitions are composed of 3 people. So, this is how we do here at Neps too.

Which competitions allow teams?

Competitions like the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) and its regional phases allow you to participate with a team of up to 3 people.

The reason for that is to force participants to develop team skills, communication, respect and learn how to cooperate to achieve the best result.

Other competitions like the regular rounds at Codeforces and the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) don't allow its participants to compete as a team.

Here at Neps. You can create competitions and select which kind of participants are accepted. The competition can accept both teams and individuals, only teams or only individuals.

Who should you invite to your team?

The most important thing when competing is to have fun with friends. However, if you are really aiming for winning competitions your team should try to cover some of the topics listed below:

  • Someone in your team needs leadership skills. He will organize the team, pressure others members and keep your team on track.
  • The members should have a different skillset. This is important since the content required in competition is so vast, making it (almost) impossible for someone to know and be good at everything.
  • Have a team of different ages can be beneficial since the members will stop competing at a different time, carrying their knowledge to "the next generation".

These are just some of our tips, please share your through on what makes a good team in the comments below.

How to create a team?

To create a team here at Neps, just go to the Teams page as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 :Select Teams

Select create a team.

Figure 2 : Create a team

Fill in the information in the form. Choose your Team's name, a nice picture representing your Team, and a password that your friends will use to join your Team. Then, hit save.

Figure 3 : Fill in the information

Now you can navigate to your Team's page.

Figure 4 : Go to Team's page

There, you can hit the Show Password button on the sidebar. The ID and password of your Team will show on the screen. This is the information that you have to share with your friends so they can join your Team.

Figure 5 : ID and Password

How to join a Team?

Join a Team is easy. First, go to the Teams page. Then, use the information provided by the person that created the Team and hit join. That is it! Now you are part of a Team.

Figure 6 : Join a Team

How to join a coding competition as a Team?

When you are on the competition page, look for the Join Competition button. When you hit it, the model will show up.

You can then select if you want to participate as an individual or as a Team. If you want to participate as a Team, you have to choose which Team you want to register in the competition.

If it is a closed competition, you may need to enter a password.

Then, just hit join.

Figure 7 : Select the Team that you want to register in the competition

It is important to know that only one team member needs to register the Team in the competition. After the Team is registered, all members can access the competition page.

In the competition, all members can see the solutions of the Team, and all solutions count to the Team's score.

Participating in the Teams Rankings

You Team will participate in the leaderboards. To see how good you and your team members are performing just look for your team in the Teams' Rankings (accessible from the menu or clicking on the button below). The score of your team is simply the sum of the score of its members.

I hope you have fun coding together with your friends!

Comments