Maxim Ivankov, who has developed robotics and programming schools for children over nine years, describes the decision to prepare students from fifth grade onward for the All-Russian Olympiad for Schoolchildren in the ninth-grade category. The initiative targets informatics profiles including information security and robotics, which now operate as independent tracks alongside programming and artificial intelligence.
The core motivation stems from the structure of the olympiad: only the school and municipal stages are available before ninth grade, delivering no meaningful benefits beyond certificates. Regional stages, which open pathways to final-stage diplomas, prizes, and BVI university admission without entrance exams, begin exclusively at ninth grade. A ninth-grade diploma grants four years of eligibility for admission outside competition and regional cash awards that vary dramatically across Russia, from 500,000 roubles in Moscow to as little as 5,500 roubles in Lipetsk Region.
Enrollment efforts in the current year reached more than 400 notified students across local schools yet produced only two registrations for completely free, multi-year preparation groups. No families attended the scheduled introductory meeting. Ivankov notes that even a conservative one-percent participation rate from the district’s three thousand eligible students would have yielded thirty participants, underscoring the gap between stated interest and actual engagement.
Neural networks have further complicated early stages. The school stage runs remotely without supervision, and current models solve tasks at olympiad level. Official rules contain no references to artificial intelligence, and contradictory guidelines allow both school-based proctored sittings and home completion on any device. In contrast, the Unified State Exam has deployed AI detectors since 2020. The resulting score distributions no longer follow the expected bell-curve shape, complicating assessment of genuine performance.
The chosen preparation route exploits a formal allowance: participants may attempt tasks for their own class or any higher class. Fifth-grade students may therefore register for the ninth-grade track, locking their level for subsequent municipal and regional stages. This provides five opportunities to reach the regional or final stage rather than a single attempt in ninth grade without prior experience. Historical data show that consistent multi-year preparation markedly improves outcomes, as evidenced by seventh- and eighth-grade finalists in recent seasons.
Task analysis across seasons reveals a sharp difficulty gradient. Municipal-stage problems in robotics have included identifying crops from photographs and calculating discounts, while regional stages require Arduino practice and project work worth 60 of 100 points. Final-stage tasks have featured the RANSAC algorithm and traversal of a ten-dimensional hypercube. Cryptography topics such as RSA, Miller-Rabin primality tests, and the theorems of Fermat and Euler appeared only once across three years of ninth-grade information-security papers, solely at the final stage.
From 120 current students, ten were selected for intensive preparation on a custom platform that records detailed engagement metrics. The program emphasizes self-directed work in information security and robotics, profiles that offer the same admission advantages as traditional subjects while facing lower competition.
