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The Junior Balkan Olympiad in Informatics (JBOI) aims at motivating elementary school students of the Southeastern Europe:

• To get more interested in informatics and information technology in general;

• To test and prove their competence in solving problems with the help of computers;

• To exchange knowledge and experience with other students of similar interest and qualification;

• To establish personal contacts with young people of the Southeastern European region.

Because an additional goal of JBOI is to prepare junior programmers for participation in other programming contests, and especially in International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), the Regulations of JBOI are as close as possible to these of IOI. When a problem arises that is not clarified by the Regulations of JBOI it will be resolved in the spirit of Regulations of IOI

JBOI is organized annually by the Ministry of Education or a similar state institution and conducted by an appropriate institution and/or organization of one of the following countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Cyprus, FYRO Macedonia, Greece, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, and Turkey, called members of JBOI. The country that organizes the current Olympiad is called Host.

Enlarging or decreasing of the list of members of JBOI can only be adopted by consensus at General Assembly.

The Host of the next Olympiad is chosen by GA on rotation principle before the end of the current. If this is impossible, the Host of the current Olympiad continues to coordinate efforts for finding the next Host.

Teams that are members of JBOI are invited by the Host as regular participants.

The Host could invite for participation, only for hosted by it contest, teams of countries that are not members of JBOI, called guest teams.

Each team is composed of up to four elementary school students (contestants), team leader (TL) and deputy team leader (DTL). Contestants have to be enrolled as regular school students during the year N of the Olympiad and born no earlier than January 1st, N - 15.

All local expenses of members of JBOI (for 2 leaders and up to 4 contestants), provided by general regulation, are covered by the organizers. Only the costs of travel to and from the place of the competition should be paid by teams.

If it is not mentioned something else in the invitation letter, the guest teams have to pay their local expenses. (See Requirements)

Accompanying persons and observers are welcome, but they should pay for hospitality too. Interested people are advised to contact local organizers. (See Requirements)

If a member country cannot send a team of contestants to certain JBMO, it may send a representative, who could participate in the Jury with the right to vote.

The official language of JBOI is English. Students may use their mother tongue.

Team leaders must be able to speak and write in English, as well as in the language(s) of their team.

Programming problems will be formulated in English and then translated by the team leaders to the mother tongue(s) of their contestants. Both versions will be given to the students.

The General Assembly (GA) is composed of team leaders of the participating countries and the President of current JBOI, nominated by the Host. Each member country has one vote in GA. Leaders of the invited guest teams participate in work of GA without voting.

President coordinates the work of the GA without voting.

The GA selects problems to be solved in the competition from a set of problems prepared and proposed by the Scientific Committee and decide distribution of the medals.

The Scientific Committee (SC) consists of a chairman and a number of experts (SC members) from the host country. It becomes active well before the beginning of the Olympiad and has the task of selecting and preparing problems proposals.

The second task of the SC is to test and evaluate the solutions of the contestants. For the purpose the SC could incorporate an Evaluation Team (ET).

For preparing of the Olympiad the Host could form an Organizing Committee (OC). The responsibilities of the OC are: meeting and accommodation of the participants, opening and closing (award distribution) ceremonies, providing contest environment, organizing the free time of the participants, preparing printing and electronic materials about the contest, etc.

For better execution of the responsibilities the OC could form specific sub-committees.

All problems are algorithmically oriented. No special hardware requirements or software packages and libraries (e.g. graphic packages) will be needed to solve the problems.

Programs have to read input data from standard input (keyboard) and to write results to standard output (console).

The problems must be formulated so that they can be solved with standard set of statements of the used programming language, standard primitive data types, strings, one-dimensional and/or two-dimensional arrays and elementary type constructions.

It is supposed that general knowledge of elementary mathematics and programming is known by competitors as follow:

The computers will be HP Compaq 6715s laptops compatible with selected software packages. Only the computers and software with built-in help facilities provided by the organizers may be used during the competition.

The programming languages of the contest are Pascal, C/C++ and C#. The precise versions of the compilers and the available programming environments will be updated each year.

The compilers and programming environments will be installed on the hard disk.

On the day before first competition day competitors are entitled to try the equipment for up to one hour.

The competition consists of two rounds in two different days.

In every round to the contestants will be proposed to solve three problems in three and half hours.

For each problem the amount of memory that could be used and the time limit for executing of a single test case will be provided.

Within the first hour of the round contestants may submit written questions (either in English or in their national language) to the SC, concerning the formulation and interpretation of the problems. Only questions that can be answered with 'Yes', 'No' or 'No comment' may be accepted. The answers will be produced by the members of the SC, approved by the chairman of the SC, and returned to contestants as soon as possible.

The whole communication between the JBOI authorities and contestants will be in a written form.

Before the end of each competition round, each contestant should prepare his/her solutions (sources) in files and to submit it to the EC, through the Contest Grading System, for evaluation.

The use of digital, printed, sound and other materials during the contest is forbidden.

When the time allowed for problem solving is over, the solutions of each of the contestant will be compiled and checked by the Contest Grading System, using previously unpublished test data.

The evaluation is based on the test data and the responses of the programs only.

If the solution of the contestant uses no more memory then it was mentioned, finishes the work within the specified time limit and produces the expected result for a given test case, then the contestant win the grading points assigned to this test case.

Ranking of the contestants is done by the sum of obtained grading points from the two rounds.

The evaluation procedure concludes with a report of the Scientific Committee for each of contestants and for each of the two days.

If a team leader is dissatisfied with the report of the evaluation, he/she may appeal to the General Assembly whose decision is final.

The task selection procedure is the following:

The appealing procedure is the following:

Distribution of the medals procedure is the following: