USACO Bronze: Implementation Tips, Tricks, and How to Practice
Welcome to the exciting world of competitive programming! Are you considering training for USACO Bronze? If so, you've come to the right place.
In order to solve a USACO problem, you will need the right problem-solving techniques. You will also need to be able to code a working solution under time pressure. What are the necessary problem solving techniques? An outline and exploration of past problems is provided for free at https://usaco.guide/bronze/. Breakout Mentors provides tutoring for problem solving, pairing you with an experienced competitor who can ask leading questions to help you gain insights into the problem. Not just looking at solutions, but helping you connect the dots and be challenged at the right pace.
Instead of problem solving, the goal of this video course is to give you all the implementation tips and tricks you need to quickly and accurately solve problems. Plus, we'll cover how to practice if you aren't quite ready to consistently solve USACO past contest problems: what you should do to build up to that point.
What it covers:
- Why train for coding implementations at or below your skill level
- Setting up your coding environment
- Reading inputs
- Tips: skip some conditionals
- Tips: store duplicate info
- Tips: looping through variables
- Tips: language specific knowledge
- Tips: debugging
- How to practice and benchmarks to know when to advance
- USACO Bronze test strategy
What is included:
- 68 minutes of video
- 24 code samples demonstrating the tips
- 12 links to practice problems and benchmarks for various skill levels
Who this is for:
- An intermediate coder who has started competitive programming, aiming for USACO Bronze
- Using Python or Java
- Knows arrays, strings, and maps / dictionaries
- Struggles to consistently solve USACO 2019-2021 Bronze problems within 45 minutes (the problem difficulty was easier and more consistent back then)
What this doesn't cover:
- Teaching you how to code with loops, variables, and conditionals
- Teaching you arrays or other data structures
- Problem solving techniques or solution walkthroughs of past problems
Your instructor:
- Brian Skinner has spent the last decade helping kids and teenagers learn to code
- Stanford Engineering alumni
- Gained USACO expertise from hiring Gold and Platinum competitors as mentors and to develop the Breakout Mentors 1-on-1 curriculum