RSA

Why Russian Educators Prepare Sixth Graders for Ninth-Grade All-Russian Olympiads in Robotics and Information Security

Maxim Ivankov, who has run robotics and programming schools for children for nine years in a small Russian town, explains the decision to train students starting from fifth grade for the All-Russian Olympiad for Schoolchildren in the ninth-grade category. The strategy addresses the fact that regional and final stages begin only at ninth grade, while earlier participation yields only certificates with no benefits such as BVI university admission or regional prizes. The approach gives students up to five attempts instead of one, allowing systematic skill building similar to consistent athletic training. Challenges include extremely low enrollment despite free classes and widespread use of neural networks to solve school-stage tasks remotely, which distorts results and lacks regulatory prohibitions. The 2025/26 season introduced four separate profiles under informatics, including information security and robotics, both of which grant the same BVI privileges as mathematics or physics. Detailed analysis of past tasks shows a steep difficulty jump from municipal to regional stages, with topics such as the RANSAC algorithm and ten-dimensional hypercube traversal appearing only at the final level.