Hello CF !
Before you proceed further, I do appreciate the efforts from Edvard and MikeMirzayanov about doing the Educational rounds, and putting their time for it. This post is solely based to try and make it better.
What got my thoughts about this was a recent conversation with MedoN11 about them.
The goal of the educational rounds is to educate people about well known topics/techniques in Competitive Programming, right ?
While I really like Educational Rounds, I personally do not see that much of a difference between them and regular rated rounds, maybe C-D are easier than usual for Educational, but if someone puts up an Educational as a rated round, I don't think many will notice.
IMO, it would be really great if we can start seeing classical problems appear. ( Basic RMQ, Classic Maxflow applicatons, Popular but "classic" DP optimizations,etc).
Many of these types ( and of course others that I do not know about) hardly appear in Educational rounds, and if they do, they are often a little bit random. For example, the past 2 rounds were really great for learning Matrix Power applications, first one was classical Linear recurrence to let you know about them, and the other was an application using them to count paths in a graph, but I can’t think of something else similar that happened.
If problems start to follow the same pattern but for a variety of topics, CF will have a plenty of classical problems similar to those on UVa/SPOJ that are used in trainings of different levels, and even make CF better than it is! And for sure, the problems will not be simple classical problems. They will need some creativity, as well ;)
I hope Edvard have a look at this. Thanks!
If you can't see the difference between educational and regular rounds, then they really educate you.
For sure I learn from both educational and regular rounds. The point is that although random practice is really powerful, topic-oriented practice is necessary. Anyone can figure out random practice through regular rounds or solving problems by most solved or maybe some other ways since online judges have a lot of problems to solve. However, topic-oriented practice is important to make everyone aware of different topics that appear frequently. In addition, some topics only appear as hard problems and maybe as subproblems of hard problems.
So from my point of view, the educational rounds will be more effective if it is created based on some topics instead of selecting problems at random and maybe providing in the editorial some links to learn the required topics to solve these problems. There is an awesome list over here but I don't think anyone will be able to learn learn about everything listed there :D. ACM-ICPC contestants, for example, would like to learn a lot of topics/tricks/techniques in a short period of time to be able to do well in upcoming regional contests. And that will be extremely beneficial for anyone new to the community, as well.
Educational rounds are not just random practice. They have problems with well-known ideas that are pretty easy if you know them. And these ideas are quite important because they are sometimes used in other, more difficult problems. If you don't know the right idea, the problem may be extremely hard to solve. If you want to be successful, you should know these ideas and be able to see them.
Can you explain further? Hey guys, I'm not trolling. I really can't understand what his comment means.