Open Russian Schoolchildren Research Conference

Not everything in those years was a timed contest. In March 2003, as an 11th-grader at UPML, I traveled to Moscow for the XI Open Russian scientific-practical conference of schoolchildren, organized by the Moscow Committee of Education, and presented a talk in the Informatics section: a program for plotting graphs of systems of equations and inequalities with parameters (Программа построения графиков систем уравнений и неравенств с параметрами).

The software took a family of equations and inequalities with a free parameter and rendered how their graphs shifted as that parameter moved — a small piece of educational tooling built out of the same graph-and-plot problems that show up constantly in school algebra courses. The talk earned a Diploma III, a modest result next to the programming olympiads, but a useful reminder that the same interests that drove the contest work also produced something meant to be used rather than judged.