The USA Computing Olympiad (USACO) is a prestigious national programming competition for middle and high school students in the United States. The competition is held online and consists of four contests each year: Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum, with increasing difficulty. Participants solve algorithmic problems within a set time, testing their problemsolving and coding abilities across topics like dynamic programming, data structures, graph theory, and number theory.
Students begin in the Bronze division and can advance to higher levels based on their performance. High scorers can earn invitations to specialized training camps and may be selected for the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI).
USACO is a great way for students to hone their coding skills, challenge themselves with complex problems, and gain recognition in the competitive programming community, with many top performers eventually landing internships and career opportunities in tech.
The International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), the most prestigious international computing contest at the high school level, was launched in 1989 by the the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), designed in the spirit of several other prominent international high-school olympiads. In 1992, Dr. Don Piele, professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin Parkside, heard about the IOI, and founded the USACO in order to bring a team from the USA to the event. The first USA team attending the 1992 IOI was formed from top individuals in the International Computer Problem-Solving Contest, a popular programming contest Don had organized since 1981. From 1993 onward, USACO finalists have been selected via a national competition, and invited to a rigorous academic summer training camp to further improve their skills. The training camp was held at the University of Wisconsin Parkside for many years; it was held at Colorado College from 2005-2007, and then moved to Clemson University in 2010.
For its first two decades, the USACO was directed by Don along with Head Coach Dr. Rob Kolstad and a dedicated volunteer staff, many of whom are former USA team members from past IOIs. Over the years, Rob built out the on-line infrastructure of the USACO to allow us to run monthly competitions at multiple levels of difficulty each year, in addition to the final US Open competition. Together with legendary coach Hal Burch, Rob also established the USACO training pages, which have helped teach algorithmic problem-solving to tens of thousands of students from around 90 countries worldwide. After Don and Rob’s retirement from running USACO, the organization is currently headed up by Dr. Brian Dean, a computer science professor at Clemson University who has been a member of the USACO staff for more than two decades.
In 2021, the USACO began training and sending team of top female USA computing students to the European Girls’ Olympiad in Informatics (EGOI), where we have continued to show increasingly stronger performance over time. USA teams attending the IOI have also shown steady and consistent improvement in their performance over the years, and the USA now regularly places among the top countries attending the IOI. The following is a list of all of our past IOI and EGOI team members and the medals they earned at these events.
