Lille Kat

Lille Kat events are held every two to three weeks on Friday afternoons at ITU and aimed at students from all study programmes who want to spend time solving problems, improving their programming skills, and hanging out with friends. Lille Kat is held in a friendly and relaxed environment for practicing collaborative problem solving; participants are encouraged to help each other and have fun.

The events aim to be fun and challenging for programmers of every skill level. Students who are just learning programming are particularly welcome. Each event will feature a selection of problems from the Kattis archive. The selected problems range in difficulty so all participants can solve at least one question.

There are free snacks and sodas at each event, and – depending on third-party funding – sometimes pizzas.

When and where?

Lille Kat takes place at the 2nd floor Atrium tables in the (main) RLV building of ITU. There is usually a snack station on one of these tables. Lille Kat takes place on various Fridays throughout the semester. A session typically lasts from 16:00 to 19:00; but you can show up or leave at any time.

Upcoming events

For Spring 2024, Lille Kat happens on the following Fridays through the Spring semester:

• 3 May 2024, 16-19 - Lille Kat 2024:05. Kattis event

To keep yourself updated, join our Lille Kat channel on ITU’s Teams or follow our facebook site.

Past Lille Kat events

Why?

There are plenty of reasons to show up for Lille Kat, in particular if you are a newcomer:

• Social interaction. Lille Kat is a great excuse to just meet up with fellow students, chatting about life, possibly talking about coursework or leftover exercises from other classes, and possibly even solving one or two Lille Kat problems. Lille Kat works very well as a social lubricant to meet other people.
• Get help. Lille Kat is a great opportunity to meet your teaching assistant, older students, or staff, who attend Lille Kat because they are happy to be interrupted with all kinds of questions. Ask us anything – very basic programming or computer questions, today’s Lille Kat exercises, some course work you’re stuck on, basic maths, life hacks, research questions, navigating university or academia – we love to help.
• Become much, much better at programming. No matter whether you’re still struggling with while or already understand that a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors: solving a number of Kattis exercises every week is one of the most satisfying and accessible ways to increasing your programming skills.
• Become much, much better at problem solving. No matter whether you’re still struggling with list traversal or mainly worry about how to optimise your hand-crafted FFT implementation: solving a number of Kattis exercises every week turns you into a monster in basic algorithms, data structures, computational thinking, problem solving, and graph algorithms.
• Team building. You can bring your existing reading group to Lille Kat and focus on the collaborative aspect. You learn a lot about each other and yourself, and you can establish a team identity with a painful team name, mascot, or hoodie. We’re not judging.

Do I have to prepare?

No formal preparation is required, and you can show up at any time. However:

• It’s more fun if you find some friends to team up with. Especially if you think of a good team name!
• You should bring a computer for programming, and you’ll need pen and paper for problem solving and collaborative thinking.
• If you enjoy writing code together we can recommend looking into Live Share.
• If you’ve never done something like this before and want to get a feeling for the type of problems appearing at the events, you can try to solve some easy problems on Open Kattis, such as echoechoecho or babybites. This is particularly useful for learning how to read and write input and output. But don’t stress out over this beforehand – we’ll help during the event.

Where do I ask additional questions

Ask questions and join the conversation at the Lille Kat channel on ITU’s Teams.

People

The people behind Lille Kat are

• Felicia Violeta Sørensen (organizer)
• Thore Husfeldt (chair of problem committee)
• Troels Lund
• Martin Aumüller

The Friends of Lille Kat arrange many related events.