There are several high school programming contest in the state of Florida that my students can participate in. There is one in November sponsored by the ACM student chapter of Stetson University in Deland, FL. Stetson is a small private school located north of Orlando, FL and they will be celebrating their tenth year of sponsoring the contest. Kudos to the students and faculty who put in the time to sponsor these types of events because the high school students really like going. For those of you who might not know anything about these contests I'll describe what takes place at a typical contest. High school students arrive at 8 am to register. After being welcomed by the faculty at the University, the students are assigned to a room and they have one pc per 3 students to work on projects. Each competition is different. Some only allow one language like JAVA to use for the contest and others will mix different languages like C++, Visual Basic.NET and believe it or not PASCAL. Students will then have an opportunity to work on a practice problem and submit their results to the judges. They get an opportunity to learn how to submit properly and to fix their errors and then resubmit. A typical problem would be like this: After a short break, the contest begins and for 3 hours the group works as a team to solve as many problems as they can. After lunch there usually is a campus tour and the university students will then show the high school students the projects that they have been working on. This is the best part for me because some of the projects are fantastic work. After viewing these projects there is an awards ceremony. Everyone gets a prize at Stetson Universities competition which is nice. Even if its a flash memory stick. The top awards are free computers that are donated to the winning schools. Our school won one of these 5 years ago. All in all, its an exhausting day for students and faculty members who drive long distances to the contest. For those high schools who don't have a local college that has these events there is the USS Computing Olympics which is a contest students can do online. Finally, there is the high school student competition that is sponsored by Microsoft Corporation called project hoshimi that students can compete. It's very important to get your students involved even if they don't come in first place. They will have fun and develop friendships with students across the state. Here are the colleges/universities that are listed on the ACM site who sponsor a high school programming competition: RL and we'll provide a link here. Armstrong Atlantic State University Georgia Institute of Technology Indiana University - Purdue University at Indianapolis Miami University Northwestern University Purdue University Saginaw Valley State University Stetson University (HSPC link) University of Arkansas University of Florida University of Iowa University of South Dakota ACM University of Pennsylvania University of Michigan at Ann Arbor Virginia Polytechnic Institute Universita' degli Studi di Pisa University of Houston-Downtown