ACSL Class

What Is ACSL

ACSL (American Computer Science League) is an international computer science competition among more than 200 schools from United States, Canada, Europe, Africa and Asia. There are four divisions: Classroom, Junior, Intermediate, and Senior. Their regular competition consists of four contests, in which individual students compete to get their school team qualified for the All-Star competition. The top scoring teams in each division will then be invited to complete at its All-Star Contest.

Each round consists of two parts: a written section and a programming section. Written topics include "what does this program do?", digital electronics, Boolean algebra, computer numbering systems, recursive functions, data structures (heaps,  binary search trees, stacks, queues), lisp programming, regular expressions and Finite State Automata, bit string flicking, graph theory, assembly programming and  prefix/postfix/infix  notation.  For the programming section, a student is given a problem, works alone, and has up to 72 hours to submit a programming solution, usually using Java or Python.

Official website: http://acsl.org/

ACSL Saturday Class

The purpose of this class is to prepare 6th-8th grade students for the ACSL competitions and at the same time learn computer science concepts. A typical class will cover a specific topic in some depth with a lecture, some classwork and discussion, and a practice test based on problems from previous year contests. Announcements, lecture notes and homeworks are posted on the Slack class channel.

The class is primarily led by Andrew Yang, a junior at Westview High School and the leader of the school's Computer Science Club.