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That was the key advice when we spoke with coaches and judges who are working with some 150 students attending Hello Barcelona Programming Bootcamp, which began on Wednesday. Harbour.Space University organised the event together with Moscow Workshops ACM-ICPC.

Oleg Khristenko, the Chief Judge at the boot camp, summed it up nicely for the attending students. "It's a training event, so... well, they can do some of the things that they shall do in those 2 weeks while in their university or real life: don't let anything else disturb their problem solving and teamwork experience at the boot camp contests and the contest upsolving."

Upsolving is a name used to describe the sessions where the teams go through the exercises they tried to solve during the practice contest earlier.

Many 2017 World championships finalists - including the champions from ITMO University, as well as the top universities Waterloo, Central Florida, National University of Singapore, Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology all joined the training camp, which will run from now until Oct 5.

Focus + Talk, Upsolve, Sleep

A coach Gleb Evstropov – himself a double-winner of Gold Medal at ACM ICPC finals – wrapped his advice: "The general guideline will be: communicate with other participants as much as you can, make sure you do upsolving (at least some), keep track on how much you sleep."

At the boot camp, the teams have been divided into two divisions – with former World Finalists and likely more advanced teams in Division A and others in Division B. Both Divisions tackle Thematic contests, which are aimed to help the teams to train the skills in algorithms given at lectures, and implement ideas from those lectures. Common contests are simulations of the World Finals or Regionals and are a compilation of problems from different authors from different countries or a problem set that’s been created by one group of authors.

"To get the most out of a boot camp, the team must work not only at the contest time, but at upsolving as well. Moreover, upsolving is most important part of boot camp: if team did not solve the problem during the contest time and did not submit it at the upsolving (they know what to do from analysis), they know that they can't solve such problems; but if problem was accepted at the upsolving, they can solve such problems and thereby progress from their level," said Khristenko, whose Chief Editor Snarknews.info and Co-Founder of Programming Open Cup.