Changing the teaching of informatics in secondary (and primary) education is in many countries difficult to achieve, owing to several reasons: the natural tendency of institutions and people to stick to well-established practices, a distorted view of informatics prevailing in society and among those who take the decisions, the specific fact that in several school systems the teaching of informa...

There are several International olympiads for secondary school students, but the five which are most widely recognised are those in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and informatics, in approximate order of founding. Most of these were originally founded under the auspices of UNESCO. Of these, the discipline most closely related to Informatics is mathematics, and in fact in several count...

Some eight years ago, I described in [33, 34] the International Mathematical Olympiad (usually abbreviated as IMO) from the perspective of the jury consisting of all team leaders, who select and translate the problems, grade the submitted work, and establish the final results. That NAW article closed with the words: “I think it would be an excellent challenge to bring the IMO to the Netherlands...

Can “all” students learn “real” physics? Physics First and Physics for All have become a success story for thousands of students in urban, suburban, and rural districts. At the same time, the International Physics Olympiad and other competitions have raised the expectation of what the most motivated students can achieve. Many physics educators are exploring ways to set higher goals for our most...

*Professor of Medicine, T.N. Medical College (Retd.), Hon. Physician, Bhatia Hospital, Mumbai H (460 B.C. 370 B.C.) was a Greek physician universally known as father of medicine. Very little is known about what he actually thought and did. Scanty information about Hippocrates is found in the writings of Aristotle and Plato. Ancient biographer of Hippocrates Soranus mentions that he was born on ...

Most contemporary clinical reasoning tests typically assess non-automatic thinking. Therefore, a test is needed to measure automatic reasoning or pattern recognition, which has been largely neglected in clinical reasoning tests. The Puzzle Test (PT) is dedicated to assess automatic clinical reasoning in routine situations. This test has been introduced first in 2009 by Monajemi et al in the Oly...

We examine the precision with which the cumulative score from a suite of test cases ranks participants in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). Our concern is the ability of these scores to reflect achievement at all levels, as opposed to reflecting chance or arbitrary factors involved in composing the test suite. Test cases are assumed to be drawn from an infinite population of simi...

We determine all triples (a, b, n) of integers with gcd(a, b) = 1 and n ≥ 1 such that n divides a + b for k = max(|a|, |b|). In particular, for positive integers m,n we show that n | m+1 if and only if either (m,n) = (2, 3), (m,n) = (1, 2), or n = 1 and m is arbitrary; this generalizes a couple of problems from the 1990 and 1999 editions of the International Mathematical Olympiad. Then we solve...