Selecting and Training Students with No Suitable Informatics Background for Informatics Olympiads ? The Case of Syrian Olympiad in Informatics

Many countries suffer from a bad informatics syllabus in their educational systems, which leaves the students with no skills in computer programming or algorithms. This fact imposes a big challenge to the process of selecting the best secondary school students for the informatics Olympiad; it also makes training them a harder process. In this paper, we present our vision to tackle this issue in Syria, where the educational system lacks the principles of computer algorithms; moreover, the educational system tends to target student skills that do not include creativity nor innovation. We show the process of gradual selection of students along with the scientific materials of contests in each step, we present the training process in all stages as well. As the process evolved in the last ten years, the statistics of the enrolled students as well as the practical results were provided at last.