Tech Scouts Computer Science
The Computer Science course of Tech Scouts is an intensive 3-week summer course. Although the course itself can be pricey, I managed to get it for free as part of the prize for winning a Gold Medal at the 2019 Catalan Olympiad in Informatics.
The course, which was hosted in the St. Paul's School Campus in Barcelona, is tailored depending on your level (Beginner, Intermediate or Advanced). A first-day exam is taken by all students in order to determine the best level for each. Although back then I struggled a bit in math, I managed to get the Advanced level in both computer science and math.
The classes themselves were extremely productive and engaging, and were exclusively taught by experts in computer science and mathematics. Every class starts introducing fundamental concepts, and then thoroughly nails them down by going trough curated problems one by one. There were also many take-home problems, which were optional and would be corrected after-the-fact.
The things I believe were the most helpful were the advanced algorithms and data structures. Before I didn't have a formal education on computer science, and was more or less self-taught. By the time I finished the course, however, I had learned a broad range of advanced data structures and algorithms, which greatly benefited me in future contests and helped broaden my horizon when studying computer science.
Some of the things I learned thanks to the course:
- Binary Search Trees: AVLs, Red-black, Treaps, etc.
- Range Queries: Binary Index Trees, Segment Trees, Sparse Tables, etc.
- Union Finds (Disjoint Sets)
- Tries & Suffix Trees
- SQRT Decomposition
- Persistent Data Structures
Besides all the concrete knowledge that the course provides, the most valuable aspect of it is that it fundamentally changed how I aproached math and computer science problems. Instead of relying mostly on intuition, the approach that the course prioritized was much more formal and structured, which really helped me progress and get deeper into computer science.
Overall, a great and memorable formative experience.
