About the ACSL

Since 1977, the American Computer Science League (ACSL) has organized a year-long contest for students in K-12 in computer programming and computer science. Every year, over 500 teams from around the world compete in a year-round series of tests and challenges.

Students and professionals compete with each other on solving computer programming challenges. Some competitions can be completed in a couple of hours, while some take days and weeks to solve.  There are a number of coding competition leagues for high school students, and a few are also open to students in K-12.  One of them is called the American Computer Science League (ACSL).

The Competition

The ACSL competition tests both computer science and computer programming skills. Computer Science topics include binary/hex/octal number systems, Boolean algebra, and graph theory, whereas Computer Programming problems test the student's logical skills by coming up with code that takes a certain input and converts it into a specified output.

Every 2 months, students take an online 30-minute test consisting of 5 short-answer questions, as well as a programming challenge to be solved in 72 hours.

Our Team

Penguin Coding School will field teams in the Junior Division (grades 7-9), the Elementary Division (grades 4-6), the Intermediate Division (grades 10-12), and the Classroom Division (grades 7-12). Because of the nature of the team, we can only accept a small number of students.

Like all our coding & robotics classes, Penguin Coding wants the students to learn a lot but also enjoy the experience.  We will conduct a series of free tryout classes and select students who seem to genuinely enjoy learning advanced material and coding challenges.  If we accept the student and they decide to join, there is a charge per semester.

We will look at each applicant's availability and try to find meeting times that work for the largest number of students who are accepted into the team. Students must be able to attend at least 80% of our weekly 60 minute classes.