Sultan Qaboos University is organizing the 2019 Gulf Programming Contest (GPC 2019) during the period 31 March to 2 April 2019. As many as 55 teams including 49 teams representing 31 universities in the Gulf and 27 teams from the universities and colleges in the Sultanate are participating in the contest. The number of participants is more than 200.

SQU is being active in organizing programming contests since 2005 when the contest started as a local activity operated for the students majoring in Computer Science Department. The contest was called “eXtreme Programming” (XP). Two years later, the contest was opened for the Omani local colleges; spreading the culture of Programming Contests across the country; and increasing the number of participating teams gradually every year, with few invited teams from GCC region. In 2013, the contest has become in a big development. It converted to the National version of the ACM’s International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), and since then it keeps holding the new name “ACM-Oman Collegiate Programming Contest-OCPC”.

ACM-OCPC was the first national contest in the GCC region, which entered the ACM-ICPC scheme. As a result, the contest started attracting more teams from local institutes and GCC universities. The number of GCC’s participating teams in ACM-OCPC hits the maximum in 2014 when 12 teams from the region were among 32 teams participated in OCPC2014. Gulf Programming Contest (GPC) is officially sponsored by ProgressSoft Co. (Oman), and is being operated by the Computer Science Students Group (CSG) under supervision of a specialized team from the DCS faculty members. GPC is officially sponsored by ProgressSoft Co. (Oman), and is being operated by the Computer Science Students Group (CSG) under supervision of a specialized team from the DCS faculty members.
The contest provides college students, majoring in any computing-related field, an opportunity to demonstrate their programming and problem solving skills; and it is a platform to meet fellow students from other universities and colleges within the region. Furthermore, GPC models the ACM’s International contesting environments (i.e., ACM-ICPC) in terms of operational tools, problems specifications, judging procedures, and teams requirements. These features of GPC make it an excellent preparation opportunity for the teams to participate successfully in the ACM regional and World’s Finals contests.