Prepare (OUCC)

If you have never taken part in the OUCC, you should firstly work your way through our learning materials: 

Junior and Intermediate students:

While Junior and Intermediate students may have some familiarity with the Blockly language, it's important to note that we incorporate custom blocks. We recommend that students carefully work through the full set of Turtle Blockly tutorials to prepare effectively.

Senior and Elite students:

Senior and Elite students may possess strong programming skills, but it's crucial that they also understand how to manage input and output in their programs to ensure compatibility with our testing server. We highly recommend that students work through the code submission tutorials to avoid any issues during the timed challenge.

SSI students:

Senior and Elite SSI students will participate in the same challenges as sighted students, so the preparation remains consistent with the above sections. Junior and Intermediate SSI students will engage in a coding challenge using any one of our 11 supported text-based programming languages. While using the same platform as Senior and Elite students, they'll tackle more age-appropriate tasks. Preparation remains the same, but we suggest focusing on the easier tasks from past Senior challenges.

Practise

The most effective way to prepare for the OUCC is to practise by attempting past tasks. Tasks from previous challenges spanning two different years are available for practise without the need for registration or logging in. You can find these if you scroll down the challenges page (they appear under the Bebras practice challenges). 

OUCC syllabus

Tasks are designed around a syllabus with two areas of learning.

Learning Area One:

• Input and output
• String handling
• Mathematical operators
• Logical operators
• Conditional statements
• Loops
• Subroutines
• Lists and arrays
• File input and output (Senior and Elite only)
• Classes and objects (Senior and Elite only)

Learning Area Two:

• Logical thinking
• Algorithmic thinking
• Decomposition
• Pattern recognitition
• Abstraction
• Evaluation
• Debugging

Older Challenges

Tasks from previous challenges are accessible to registered teachers, who have the ability to assign them as quizzes for their students.

Model answers

Model answers for previous challenges are available to registered teachers and can be found in the documents section of the admin part of the site. Please note that answers are provided in Blockly and Python only. However, since all tasks have algorithmic solutions, it should be possible to use the Python code provided to develop a solution in your preferred programming language.