White Oaks Computer Science Club

The practical section is about building software and getting it in front of real users. Members work across a few different areas depending on what they want to learn.

Web development is the core of it. Students start on the front end with React, Next.js, and TypeScript, then move to the back end with Python frameworks like Flask and Django. The goal is to be comfortable taking a project from an empty folder to a working site, including the parts that are easy to skip when you are self-taught, like structuring an application, handling its data, and getting it deployed somewhere other people can actually use it.

There is also a game development track built around Roblox. Working in Roblox Studio and its scripting tools, members design and build playable games and learn how the pieces fit together, from level design and game logic through to publishing a finished game that anyone can load up and play.

The club spends time on artificial intelligence and machine learning as well. This starts from the basic question of how a model learns patterns in data and builds toward training simple models and seeing how neural networks are put together. It stays hands-on, so members come away knowing how these systems actually behave instead of just recognising the buzzwords.

The competitive section trains students for programming contests, with the Canadian Computing Competition (CCC) and the USA Computing Olympiad (USACO) as the main targets. Those contests reward knowing a set of standard algorithms and being able to reach for the right one quickly, so this section runs like a course that builds up that toolkit across the school year.

The early meetings cover the fundamentals, things like prefix sums, two pointers, binary search, and recursion. From there it builds into the techniques that carry most contest problems, especially greedy algorithms and dynamic programming. The last part of the year is a substantial unit on graph theory, moving from traversals with DFS and BFS up through shortest path algorithms like Dijkstra and Bellman-Ford and minimum spanning trees.

By the time the year is done, members have run into most of the ideas that show up again and again on the CCC, USACO, and contests like them, and they have spent months practicing those ideas on real problems instead of only reading about them.

Every year the club runs the WOSS Dual Olympiad, the largest competition held at White Oaks. It is organised together with the school's Math Club and takes place over two days. One day is a competitive programming contest and the other is a math contest, so students can enter one or both depending on where their strengths are.

The programming day runs on WMOJ, the same platform you are reading this on. Hosting it ourselves lets the club write its own problems, run the judging, and give competitors the same kind of submit and feedback experience they would get at a national contest.