The British Informatics Olympiad (BIO) is the UK's national computing challenge used to select students for the IOI, EGOI and WEOI. It is through this competition that I met most of my friends today. I feel privileged to have attended the finals twice, and as a result, represented the UK at the WEOI twice.

However, one issue I encountered during my first year of attempting this competition is the lack of helpful resources available online. There are a few YouTube video explanations, but for the vast majority of past problems from this competition, there are no editorials or model code.

That’s why I decided to create BIO Helper, a website dedicated to helping students prepare for both rounds of the competition by providing editorials and model code. With the help of many volunteers listed on the website (including, but not limited to, other BIO finalists), we now have a large proportion of Round 1 problems covered, along with a good number of Round 2 problems, with many more to come.

I want to share this site with as many people as possible so that more people can learn about competitive programming and find it easier to prepare for the BIO competition.

The website is relatively new, and we plan to add many features soon, including a grading system for Round 1. While there is publicly-available test data online, testing programs can be tedious, as it involves copying inputs, comparing outputs, and tallying points manually. Therefore, we plan to introduce a system where you can submit code, automatically receive your score, and see which test cases (if any) you failed. (Please note that in no way is this related to the official competition, during which participants will NOT be able to submit their code to be tested against any complete test data. This will just be a tool used for convenience during practice).

Finally, this project is open source, so if you find any bugs or have suggestions for improving the site, feel free to provide feedback by raising an issue on our GitHub.

Thank you for reading, and please don't forget to spread the word to those who you think may benefit from using this!