I am part of the organisation that trains and selects students to represent New Zealand at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). We attract some government funding by circuitous routes for the students to attend, but none for the leaders. Last year was our country’s best overall performance at the Maths, Chemistry, Biology and Informatics Olympiads, and the suggestion was made that we analyses the results, hopefully helping our case for fundraising.
I enlisted the help of a student during our summer camp and gave him the results for the last three Informatics Olympiads. I asked him to weight the gold, silver, and bronze medals won appropriately and then rank the country on performance with respect to population size.
Naturally India and China don’t look so good when you do that and adjusting by population is a bit spurious! But, in those three years, the same 10 countries were always in the top 10.
They are, in alphabetical order: Armenia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Singapore and Slovakia.
Nine of these are ex soviet block countries and I claim to know nothing much about them, with the exception of a little about Lithuania. Lithuania has a small band of people who work tirelessly within the education ministry (they have a centralized education system) to promote computer science, one of whom, Valentina Dagiene, attends the IOI. She has an impressive record of advocating for informatics, teaching, and producing textbooks for high schools.
If you know of the education systems in these other countries, or the state of CS in their high schools, we would love to know more. Please share you information with us by commenting!!
Margot Phillipps
CSTA International Director