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Could become a representative for Great Britian to the International Olympiad of Informatics next summer, to be held in Mexico.

If you're in northern Ireland, you'd compete in the Irish Schools' Programming Competition.

You can also compete in online contests such as USA Computer Olympiad (operated in the USA, but open to everyone), or a quick google search will yield more.

If you're an American high school or middle school student and are interested in participating in IOI in the future, you should refer to the USACO website. The American IOI team is picked from among the best performers on USACO.

If you're not an American student, USACO is probably still worth checking out, as it permits all pre-university students to compete (although only Americans can be considered for the team), and anybody in the world can enter as an observer. In fact, the vast majority of USACO participants are not American.

USACO is also working on making contest divisions that are more friendly to beginners, if you're worried about difficulty.

If anyone is interested in a programming contest for high school kids, check out USACO (USA Computing Olympiad). They have contests throughout the year (any country can participate) which lead up to the US Open (only US participates), a 5 hour, proctored contest which then determines eligibility to go to IOI (The Computer Science World Olympiad Training Camp) from which a few kids are chosen every year to represent the US in world competitions.

The contest style is very similar to the ACM (solve n problems in m hours) and often very interesting problems are given (just because it's high school, doesn't mean the kids are stupid :-).

If anyone is a computer science geek in high school or a teacher of CS in a high school, you should definitely check it out.

Since you're in the USA, you might as well check out the USA Computing Olympiad, the competition which leads to the previously mentioned IOI. It's language-specific (C, C++, or Pascal), but that doesn't matter - the problems are hard enough that you should be spending significant amounts of time thinking and working stuff out so that you can hopefully code in 20-30 minutes (per program) regardless of what language you choose. The language won't have a big effect on programming ease or time if the problems are well written.

The USA Computing Olympiad organizes four high school programming contests throughout the year. These are used to select fifteen finalists and eventually a team of four to represent the US at international competitions. Contest problems have a wide range of categories, from graph theory to dynamic programming. You can see some examples of problems from past contests and the training pages, with a series of problems designed to prepare students for these contests at their webpage at http://www.usaco.org/. Even if your students aren't interested in competing, the training pages might be a good source for something to have them do.

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