About DWITE

The notion of DWITE began, in May 2002, on the return drive, from Toronto to London, from the 2002 ECOO Final Programming Contest. Brigette, Chris, Mark and Ryan, who were silver medalists that year, were brainstorming ideas for their OAC final case study. They suggested the idea of an automated computer programming contest, that they could run from school. The first DWITE contest was held on June 7, 2002. The judging system was written in Delphi and Turbo Pascal. The contest was successful, other than the fact that the scores were not accurate.

During the summer of 2002, William Sentjens rewrote the judging system using Visual Basic. In October 2002, the contest was held using the VB judging system. It ran from a computer (Celeron III, 800 Mhz, 128 MB RAM, Win 98) at my house and their were, of course, a few problems, like the judge crashing and inaccurate scores. Since then, the DWITE Online Programming Contest judging system has run either from my house or from my school, with minor glitches, and with accurate results. Steve Wynen from the UGDSB, has provided time to proofread the contest questions and to double check the judge's test data.

In 2007 CompSci.ca toke over DWITE from William Sentjens and Daniel Servos rewrote the judging system in java and a new front end was implemented using ruby on rails to provide a much improved system of running contests. The new system will be put in place for the 2007/2008 school year and hopefully will run smoothly.

The current DWITE judge system runs on a home server that runs from Thunder Bay Ontario. It has an Intel 64-bit Quad Core CPU, running at 2.67 GHz, 2 GB of RAM and the Microsoft Vista Home operating system. The web pages, data base and front end are located on the CompSci.ca server.

The primary purpose of the DWITE Online Computer Programming Contest is to provide an avenue for Canadian secondary school students to practice for more recognized programming contests like CCC and ECOO.