Kyiv District Olympiad in Physics

Before there was informatics, there was physics. In the 1998/99 school year I was a 7th-grade student at the Technical Lyceum of NTUU "KPI", and the first olympiad title I ever won had nothing to do with programming — it was for solving problems in mechanics and electricity at the district stage of the All-Ukrainian physics olympiad, in the Zhovtnevyi district of Kyiv.

The lyceum attached to the Kyiv Polytechnic drilled its students hard in math and physics from the earliest grades, and the district win — 1st place, confirmed by order No. 322 of 28 December 1998 — was the first tangible proof that the training was taking. It would be a couple more years before informatics olympiads entered the picture at all, but the habits of mind built here — precise reasoning, comfort with formal problems, the willingness to sit still with something hard — carried straight through into the algorithmic contests that followed.