The National Technological Contest (NTC) is a team engineering contest for school and university students; it contains tracks for different age groups: school students of grades 5-7 and 8-11, as well as university students. Applicants to universities can also participate in a special competition called Talant (“Talent”). All participants attend lectures by experts and solve cases from major Russian tech companies in different fields: from AI and smart energy to nanotechnologies and gene editing.

ITMO organizes the following NTC tracks for school students in grades 8-10:

• Big Data and Machine Learning:
• Intelligent Robotics Systems; 
• Infochemistry;
• Software Engineering for Fintech (held at ITMO for the first time in 2024).

“Earlier, the track Software Engineering for Fintech was organized by other universities. This year, the honor is ours, and we here at ITMO decided to shift the focus towards IT and web development. This will help train developers well-versed in both finance and IT product design. Such specialists are currently in demand on the market, including at such major IT companies as Sberbank,” shared Alexey Itin, head of ITMO’s Admissions Office.

Overall, the track attracted around 2,000 school students from all over Russia, with only 36 successfully passing the two selection rounds before traveling to ITMO for the on-site finals. The finalists represented Moscow, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Vladivostok, and other cities.

For the finals, students were tasked with a case from Sberbank. In the course of a week, they created interactive dashboards based on data from the Central Bank of the Russian Federation and learned to predict exchange rates and stock prices with machine learning. In order to complete the tasks, the participants had to be able to code in Python, as well as demonstrate knowledge of machine learning, API, and finance. Once completed, the participants defended their websites and apps in front of experts from Sberbank and ITMO lecturers and developers. The appropriately-titled winning team took the top spot, with two others selected as runners-up.

All winners and runners-up received additional points to the results of their Unified State Exams (USE), which they will be able to use when applying to the country’s top universities, including ITMO. The applicants will be able to choose from among these highly sought-for programs: 

• System and Applied Software; 
• Neurotechnologies and Programming;
• Computer Technologies in Design;
• Software Engineering; 
• AI Engineering;
• Mobile and Online Technologies.

Moreover, winners in the category can apply for the digital portfolio competition Talant for the chance to get an additional 10 points to their USE results when applying to partner universities.

According to Alexey Itin, in the future, winners in the track can expect to get the opportunity to enroll at the country’s top universities without exams – the organizers are already working on the associated paperwork.

ITMO.NEWS talked to the participants about their experiences at the contest.

Ekaterina Kishinskaya

11th-grade student, Vladivostok

This is my first time at the NTC and I regret not having a go at it sooner. I really liked the “adult” approach implemented here: we were given the materials that we studied at our own pace – this was much more productive. For instance, I created a neural network on my own for the first time and for this I studied regression analysis in data science on my own, as well as learned to use some new tools, including Dash, Pandas, and NumPy. The first of these libraries is used in web apps and the other two – to process and analyze structured data and multidimensional arrays. Even though I have quite a lot of experience in programming, creating a neural network wasn’t an easy task. But I liked the result of my work.

I will be able to use all of these skills in the future because I really want to get into ITMO to study IT. I know many people who already study here and they tell me that even though studies are sometimes hard, the skills that they get help them become great professionals. And that’s what I like about ITMO.

Anastasia Borodulina

10th-grade student, Novosibirsk

I have participated in the NTC several times in other tracks – last year, it was Infochemistry and Business Processes Automation. But my first finals happened to be in the track Software Engineering for Fintech. At the contest, you can truly evaluate your skills and get the feel of actually working at a tech company. What’s more, in the finals, we were given more complicated tasks, which helped me pick up some new skills – for instance, I can now work with dashboard libraries and write API. I am planning to continue with programming and later get into Novosibirsk State University.

Danil Firsov

11th-grade student, Moscow

It’s my first time at the NTC and I really enjoyed that in the finals we were solving an actual case. I had to consider my project as a full-scale product and find the balance between user experience and the functionality that we wanted to achieve. This was a useful experience that will help me develop projects in similar fields, including at university.