How we do the All-Russian online Olympiad in English, mathematics and computer science

Everyone knows Skyeng primarily as a tool for learning English: this is our main product that helps thousands of people without serious sacrifices to master a foreign language. But for three years now, part of our team has been developing online olympiads for students of all age groups. From the very beginning, we immediately faced three global issues: technical, that is, the issue of development, pedagogical and, of course, the issue of involving children in participation.



As it turned out, the simplest question turned out to be technical, and the list of subjects for three years has expanded significantly: in addition to English, mathematics and computer science were also included in the program of our Olympiad . But first things first.

How to make participation in the Olympics attractive for a child

What is the essence of any school olympiad? Of course, first of all, Olympiads are organized for gifted students who are ready to show their in-depth knowledge in any subject. Intensive training is carried out with such children, teachers develop special programs and exercises for future olympiads, parents look for free windows in the schedule of their children so that, in addition to sections and courses, they can also attend optional classes.



An adult rarely raises the question “why do we need olympiads?”, Is corny because we think in completely different categories. For you and me, victory at the Olympics is an indicator of the intellectual development and depth of knowledge of the subject, so to speak, a checkmark in the “sheet of personality”. For teachers who are preparing for the olympiads of children - this is also quite a professional activity. Through such students, strong teachers realize not only their potential, but also show their colleagues and the Ministry of Education what they are capable of.



Of course, our teachers traditionally receive some material prizes from either the school or the ministry for prizes. And if you are lucky, then both will immediately fall into a nice bonus on your salary account. At the same time, no one belittles the teacher’s desire to develop a child: often these bonuses can be so insignificant, and the hassle so tough that the preparation of the Olympiad does not cost any money - it will go on drugs many times more. So many teachers do this by calling.



The victory of the child (or just participation) is also very warm for the parent. When a native child does not chase dogs, but develops by leaps and bounds in any area - it is always pleasant.



Our team perfectly understood all of the above: teachers need an olympiad, and parents need an olympiad as an activity. But why do students need the Olympics? We will omit the question of high school, in which the guys approach their future more or less meaningfully and plan to do something else. Why the olympiad to the fifth grader?





If you look closely, the case is in front of the computer science cabinet;) Photos from the offline stage, which we will talk about



Imagine yourself in the place of a child 11-12 years old. While classmates beat each other in martial arts sections, they kick a soccer ball or play computer games from their hearts, the fifth-grader-olympiadnik has to pore over textbooks, because his mother wanted him to take at least third place. Of course, most often the initiative to nominate a child for such an event comes from the teacher, but our little man is left with no choice: he was too smart, and now he is forced to become even smarter. But at that time he could arrange a “shooting” with the ball of the losing team or dominate the enemy in the mid. Moreover, in addition to the mother’s smile, the words “well done” from the teacher and some kind of letter on the wall, he won’t get anything else. Such a reward for the labors.



We considered the issue of motivating children - especially when it comes to secondary and junior school - the key to our Olympiad. Therefore, tasks for the smallest geniuses we have completed in the form of a game.





This was the task for the smallest in one of the past seasons



And high school students get nice bonuses and prizes. For example, the top three winners of grades 5-7, in addition to certificates, also received Huawei tablets. Depending on the age group, children receive prizes in the form of copies of educational games, tablets, JBL headphones, portable speakers, and so on. For example, this year we give away macbooks, projectors, tablets, headphones and speakers, personal preparation plans for the exam or the exam, as well as subscriptions to Algorithmics, ivi and Litres.





Prizes for students and teachers this season



With high school students, everything turned out, in fact, at the same time both easy and difficult. On the one hand, these children have already plunged one foot into adulthood and are preparing to enter universities. Given the age and corresponding needs, which also cannot be ignored, many take the choice of educational activity very seriously. And when it comes to gifted youth, there’s nothing to say, it’s quite difficult to “lure” them and they no longer need a simple letter to the wall.



We found a way out of this situation quite elegant: through partners. Each Skyeng Olympiad is supported by one or more higher education institutions of the country. So, now our main partners are HSE , MLU , MIPT and MISiS .



We also encourage teachers with schools. Teachers for quality training of students receive certificates for continuing education courses and small but useful gifts (for the last time, for example, they gave powerbanks).



Schools are also interested in supporting the activity of teachers at our olympiads. For example, this winter, six schools (three in the 2–4 grades category and three in the 5–11 grades category) received music centers, projectors, and licenses from Vimbox , our own online learning platform.

Search for partners among universities

With the motivation of teachers, parents and children, we figured out. The best students receive not only the realization that they are the smartest, but also valuable prizes.



But three years ago, when the Skyeng Online Olympics project was just in its infancy, we had a very prosaic question: how to organize it?



Since the initiative was manifested by the company itself, the burden of preparing training materials fell on our shoulders. We coped with this task successfully. The experts of the company who make up the training courses for the main portal were connected to the preparation of the Olympiad tasks. Since the Olympiads are seasonal and take place only twice a year, our content specialists do not complain.



Such an approach provided us with sufficient space for maneuver: we could make the Olympiad the way we thought it was necessary, and not the way “someone told us”. Therefore, tasks are always obtained not only unique, but also not divorced from life. Plus, there’s no talk of any nepotism either: all the work is done by experts working with Skyeng -

for example, Algorithmics helped us to do the Olympiad in computer science.



Another problem is partnership with universities. The entire educational system in the country is a fairly conservative sphere and newcomers to it are not very fond of, especially when it comes to a commercial organization. Inside the company, the project of the Olympiad was considered not only as a PR move, but also as a kind of social and humanitarian activity and an alternative for students in-depth studying English in terms of testing their knowledge.



It would seem, why do we even need partners among higher education institutions, when we can become self-contained and provide schoolchildren with valuable prizes? But Skyeng is an educational resource, and we believed that for high school students in their future life, preferences when entering universities, rather than headphones or laptops, would be more needed. Therefore, specifically in the case of the Olympiad for students in grades 8-11, partnership with universities was extremely important.

How is our online olympiad

The format chosen by us implies an unlimited number of participants, so the event was divided into three stages:

• training tour;
• correspondence online tour;
• full-time offline tour.

The main "movement" occurs, of course, online. However, we had to organize an offline correspondence tour of the Olympics for high school students, as a result of which the winners of previous seasons received the main prizes, including bonus points for admission.



Some readers may have a question regarding “cheating” during an online tour. Of course, we cannot restrict children in using Google when doing tasks, but here the olympiad format itself plays against cheaters. A maximum of 40 minutes is allotted for the assignment, and they are compiled in such a way that Google will help poorly: you either know the topic and can complete the assignment, or you don’t know, and in the allotted 40 minutes it is physically impossible to understand the essence of the issue.



Also, so that the cheaters do not knock out high places of real strong students applying for participation in the full-time round, the prize places are distributed not by quantity, but by percentage relative to the total number of participants. Here is an excerpt from the regulations of the Olympiad:



“Winners and prize-winners of the main round can be no more than 45% of the number of participants in the tour. The works are evaluated on a 100-point system (for grades 5-11) and on a 50-point system (for grades 2-4). ”



The number of full-time tour winners is limited to a threshold of 30%.



With such a system, a child can take a prize place, regardless of how many people take part in the Olympiad. Actually, according to this principle, most modern olympiads are held: the participant competes, in fact, directly with the organizer and compiler of tasks, and not with a cunning neighbor who writes off under a desk.



The best participants in an online tour receive an invitation to an offline event. Since our Olympiad is not constrained by any framework or boundaries, we have to negotiate with the affiliates of partners in the field in order to ensure sufficient coverage of at least the country. Thus, a student from Vladivostok will not have to go to Moscow in order to take part in the next round of the competition: everything will be organized in his hometown.

About the team and the technical side of the Olympiad

When we first launched this project in early 2017, we had 11 days and courage. Now, of course, everything is more predictable. In total, a development team of eight people is currently working on the project. Among them:

• two fullstack developers;
• frontend developer
• backend developer;
• two QA engineers;
• designer;
• and I, product manager.

The project also has two project managers and its own six-person support service.



Although the project is seasonal (Olympiads are held twice a year), but work on the portal of the Olympiad is ongoing. Since the Skyeng team consists mainly of remote employees, the Olympiad team is distributed across seven time zones: the development leader represented by the leading IT podcast Peter Vyazovetskgo lives between Riga and Moscow, while the recently hired backend developer from Vladivostok. At the same time, the processes of interaction within distributed teams allow you to work with comfort, although the employees are located at almost different ends of the continent from each other.



It would seem that some special tools are needed to coordinate such a distributed team, but our set is quite standard: Jira for tasks, Zoom / Google Meet for calls, Slack for daily communication, Confluence as a knowledge base, and we use Miro to visualize ideas. Under the cameras, as is usually the case for remote teams, no one works either, and there is no installation of external spyware, which will record every step. We believe that every specialist is an adult and responsible person, so that all accounting of working time is reduced to self-completion of worklogs.





What our reporting looks like



In terms of development technologies, the team uses quite standard tools. The Frontend of the project was moved from Angular 7 to Angular 8, and from the wonders - a library of UI components added to the needs of development.



When many people find out that we have an Olympiad that is held only twice a year, people think that this is some kind of seasonal activity. Like, the team is removed from other projects and transferred to the Olympiad for two weeks. This is not true.



Yes, the competition itself is held only twice a year - this half-year we call the “season”. But between the seasons we have enough work. We have a small team, but we are doing an important job, and at the same time, we must ensure the correct operation of the portal during the participants' tasks. An online tour usually lasts a whole month, but already in the next season we plan to reach the mark of 1 million registered participants. This means that we must be prepared for the fact that half of these people will come to carry out tasks in the first few days - and this is almost a HighLoad project.

Afterword

The number of participants in our Olympiads is constantly growing. 335 thousand schoolchildren and 11 thousand teachers were registered for the fifth season, and recently two new subjects have been added to the program of the Olympiad: mathematics and computer science. At first glance, these disciplines are a bit out of the general framework of Skyeng as a company with which people easily and quickly learn a foreign language, but fit into the general needs of a modern person.



Now the team plans to reach the mark of 1 million registered participants in the new sixth season. The goal is quite realistic, given the expansion of the number of disciplines and the overall increase in the popularity of our competition. For our part, we are doing everything to ensure that our olympiads are not only useful in an educational sense, but also interesting in terms of participation.