Polish students regularly take part in-and win-all manner of international competitions involving information technology and software design. Now they have proved their mettle again.

In August, Tomasz Kulczyński from the 6th Jan and Jędrzej Śniadecki High School in Bydgoszcz won the 19th International IT Olympiad in Zagreb, Croatia, one of the five biggest international "subject olympiads" for high school students. The event attracted a total of 284 competitors from 76 countries. As the official winner of the event, Kulczyński repeated last year's success of another Pole, Filip Wolski.

In another major event in August, Poland won in the overall classification of the fifth Imagine Cup, a world information technology competition for students held by the Microsoft company in Seoul, South Korea. The competition attracted much media interest. The finals involved 372 students from around the world, including 17 from Poland. The Poles took part in seven of the competition's nine events and won three of them. In the Algorithms event, the winner was Przemysław Dębiak from the University of Warsaw. In the Photography event, the winners were Iwona Bielecka from the Military Academy of Technology in Warsaw and Małgorzata Łopaciuk from the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw. In the Short Film event, first place went to Julia Górniewicz from the University of Warmia and Mazuria in Olsztyn and Jacek Barcikowski from the Poznań University of Technology. Moreover, the InPUT team from the Poznań University of Technology was among the six best teams in the Software Design event.

The finals of the next Imagine Cup will be held next year in Paris.

Meanwhile, the University of Warsaw tops the list among universities worldwide in the TopCoder competition, the world's biggest algorithm programming competition, and Poland is second in the league table of nations.

K.J.