This spring, Yandex will host the First Programming Conference for School Students, which will be attended by high school students from Minsk, Yekaterinburg, Moscow, Novosibirsk, Saint Petersburg, and Simferopol. This was reported to BELTA by the company's press service.

Students in grades 8-11 can participate in the conference, either individually or as part of teams of up to four people.

Young programmers will be offered three topics to choose from for developing their competition project, depending on the conference section. For example, the "Movement" section will be of interest to students who successfully solve modelling tasks. Projects can focus on modelling city traffic flow, elevator algorithms in skyscrapers, automatic control of intersections, traffic lights, or freight transport.

In the "Words" section, organisers expect projects related to texts in one way or another. These could include creating anagrams, generating poems and recipes, machine translation and morphology checking, evaluating search relevance, and "smart" filtering of search results for a specific topic.

The "Clouds" section will focus on cross-platform applications, including mobile ones, as well as client-server architecture and cloud computing.

Initial team registration is open until February 14 inclusive on the conference website: http://tech.yandex.ru/education/m/msk-apr-2014/. The application must include the chosen section, the number of participants (for teams), the contact details of the supervisor, and the city and school. Supervisors can be teachers, club leaders, parents, or other adults.

Registered teams and individual participants must send an extended application to the organisers by April 5, containing a technical description of the program, screenshots, and implementation details. The detailed format of the application will be published on the conference website.

The in-person part of the conference, to which the authors of the most interesting works will be invited, will take place on April 27 simultaneously in six Yandex offices in Minsk, Yekaterinburg, Moscow, Novosibirsk, Saint Petersburg, and Simferopol. A "live" video bridge will be organised between the offices. Participants will be asked to present their programs in a 5-7 minute presentation, and the best student works will be determined by a jury comprising key Yandex developers and experts. The award ceremony for the winners will be held on May 11. -0-