The concluding session of the ACM-Oman Collegiate Programming Contest was held at Sultan Qaboos University on 18 October 2018 under the patronage of Prof. Amer bin Ali Al Rawas, SQU Deputy Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs & Community Service. This year, 14 higher educational institutions and universities from across Oman participated in the contest. These include Sultan Qaboos University and several private universities and technical colleges. 56 teams registered for the contest and 52 teams attended with the participation of 225 students.

The performance of the teams was evaluated by a panel of experts designated by the Arab regional level competition of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. SQU team 'SQU-ASC' won the first place. The team '1024' from Waljat College of Applied Sciences won the second place whereas SQU team "Fire Spirit" bagged the third prize. These three teams along with the winners of the fourth and fifth positions will attend the regional level completion of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest that will be held in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt in November 2018.

The big number of participating institutions and students is the highlight of the Programming Contest this year. The Sultanate has formed a national level committee consisting of programming experts from higher educational institutions, private and government organizations to organize the contest. Sultan Qaboos University will host the Gulf University’s programming contest in March 2019.

Since 2005, Sultan Qaboos University represented by the Department of Computer Science at the College of Science has been organizing the "eXtreme Programmer-XP", which is held annually among students of local higher education institutions, including universities and technical and applied colleges. The teams representing these institutions meet at Sultan Qaboos university to compete in designing computer-based programs that solves real-life problems using high level programming languages such as C, C ++ and Java. At the end of the competition, which usually lasts over two days, the performance of the teams is evaluated according to defined standards in several aspects related to the efficiency of developed algorithms/programs and the ability to work under pressure.

The " eXtreme Programming Contest" was successfully upgraded to be called the "Oman Collegiate Programming Contest (OCPC)" and officially registered with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), which manages the competition at the international level. Subsequently the competition versions for 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2017 were organized under the new level and name, which is ACM-OCPC. The other development of the mechanism of organizing the competition, after it became part of the international ACM, was the invitation of a number of universities in the Gulf to participate in the competition to enable local teams to contact those teams who have active participation in the Arab and international competition.