An Advent calendar is a special calendar used to count or celebrate the days in anticipation of Christmas. Advent calendars typically begin on December 1 and provide a window to open until December 24. Usually they have windows, which you can open each day containing some chocolate or other stuff. But what is better to kill some time until Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule, Kwanzaa, Diwali, Boxing Day, etc. than an Advent calendar giving you a programming problem every day?

The Advent Programming Contest, being organized by the IEEE Student Branch Klagenfurt will provide a new problem every day from December 1st to December 24th. You can submit solutions any day until the contest ends on December 26. You can choose to use C, C++, Java, Python or Perl as programming language. The programming tasks can be solved with short programs (typically less than 100 lines of code). Until a solution is correct you can submit your program as often as you want (but please don’t spam our server). The number of tries will not be a criterion for determining your score. The idea is to do it just for fun, but we will try to announce a winner after the contest is closed. The event is open to everyone. There are separate categories for pupils, university students and others. If you want to participate, please register at http://mooshak.nes.aau.at/ (Registration will be still possible after 1st December)