France-IOI: teaching programming and algorithms

I am the co-founder and active member of France-ioi, a non-profit organization founded in 2004. The historic role of France-ioi consists in selecting and training the french team to the International Olympiads in Informatics (IOI). The other and probably most important purpose of France-ioi is to provide online teaching resources that anyone can use for learning about programming and algorithmics. Our courses are especially designed for being accessible to young students.

Online courses with automated evaluation of exercises

  • I co-author the implementation of the website www.france-ioi.org, together with Mathias Hiron and Loïc Février. The development of the website has been on-going since 2004 and now amounts to several dozen thousands lines of code.
  • I have designed many series of algorithmics exercises among the 500+ exercises available on the website. For each exercise, students can evaluate their solution on batches of test cases. The exercises and their detailed solutions serve as a basis for our courses.
  • In 2005, I wrote a programming course for beginners, based on the programming language Caml (170 pages). This course was soon afterwards adapted to C by Mathias Hiron. The success of these courses lead us to design a course even more progressive and featuring an even larger number of exercices. This new course, an on-going effort by several members of France-ioi, is based on Python, a language relatively more friendly with beginners.

Articles on pedagogie

I co-authored two articles describing the France-ioi approach to teaching programming and algorithmics.