The Department of Computer Science of the College of Sciences at SQU is hosting the 6th edition of Oman Collegiate Programming Contest (OCPC 2019). The competition commenced on Sunday, 13 October 2019, under the patronage of H.E. Dr. Ali bin Saud Al Bimani, the Vice Chancellor of SQU. As many as 152 participants in 36 teams representing 23 universities and higher educational institutions from inside and outside the Sultanate are attending the two-day competition.

Oman Collegiate Programming Contest aims at training and qualification of university students from different IT disciplines to work under pressure through creation of a competitive environment where they work on a group of life issues by designing algorithms that are implemented by using the prevailing languages in the development of algorithms: Java, C++ and Python.

The idea of the contest is to promote healthy competition between the university students in problem solving by using the high level programming languages such as Java, C ++ and Python. It seeks to create next generation of experts in the field of programming, which in term supplies the labor market by competencies in the field of IT-related jobs and designing and programming solutions in related fields such as telecommunications sector, mining and data processing and geographic navigation systems. Programming is one of the foundations on which computer science is based, and a fundamental engine for developing the fourth industrial revolution.

The competition also verifies the qualification and self-institutional training of participating students in the competition through the methods of maximum programming, design of effective algorithms and application of the solutions to the mentioned programming languages. The competition requires the participants to be well prepared in order to compete by solving many of the similar issues that are available in different sources of the global competition. Therefore, together with their trainer, the team members select various real-life problems and seek to design effective algorithms to match the capabilities of the hardware available in the competition hall, which are essentially computers used in work environments.