Project Record
Olympiads.co.uk
AI navigator for UK and international academic competitions—cataloguing opportunities, tracking deadlines, and recommending next challenges from a verified catalogue.
Executive Summary
Olympiads.co.uk is an AI consultant for families navigating a fragmented extracurricular education market. Instead of scattered links and outdated PDFs, it offers a structured catalogue of competitions, camps, lectures, guides, and school entrance pathways—filtered by age, subject, geography, and deadline.
The platform helps students, parents, and teachers answer planning questions that generic school calendars miss: what can this student apply for now, when does registration close, what preparation timeline makes sense, and what comes after the first round. An AI recommendation layer uses student profiles to suggest next challenges from the catalogue, producing a development strategy rather than a list of URLs.
Every listing is tied to a lifecycle model—from announcement through registration, preparation, competition rounds, and results—so families can plan ahead instead of discovering opportunities after deadlines pass. Age-stage pathways (7–10, 10–13, 13–16, 16–18) match how people actually think about progression, not database filters.
Olympiads.co.uk complements Problems.cc: one system handles what to prepare for and when; the other handles how to practise.
Problem
Academic enrichment outside school is fragmented. Competitions span dozens of organisers, subjects, and age bands. Registration windows are short and poorly advertised. Parents and teachers lack a single place to see what is coming, what fits a student’s level, and how opportunities connect into longer pathways (e.g. UKMT → BMO → international selection).
Static link lists and forum threads do not scale. Families need structured data, verified dates, and guidance that adapts to the student’s profile—not another uncurated spreadsheet.
Solution Path
Olympiads.co.uk combines three layers:
- Verified catalogue — competitions, camps, lectures, guides, and entrance exams with source-checked metadata.
- Planning infrastructure — deadline calendar, lifecycle stages, and age-stage routing.
- AI recommendation — conversational interface that maps student interests and constraints to catalogue entries.
Users can browse by intent (competitions, camps, lectures, guides, deadlines, school entrance) or filter the opportunities calendar by age and subject. Guides explain real selection pathways—for physics, linguistics, economics, AI olympiads, and more—in practical terms.
Implementation
Catalogue and verification
Events are sourced from organiser websites and public information, then reviewed before publishing. The calendar remains available for detailed filtering by subject, age, and deadline status (open, closing soon, closed).
Deadline and lifecycle tracking
Each opportunity exposes registration open/close dates, event dates, and where it sits in a seven-stage lifecycle: announcement, registration opens, registration closes, preparation period, first round, follow-up rounds, results. That framing helps families plan practice around real deadlines—not last-minute cramming.
AI recommendations
A chat interface accepts student context (age, interests, goals) and returns suggestions from the approved catalogue. Messages may be stored to improve recommendations over time, with clear privacy disclosure.
Age-stage pathways
Four stages mirror common planning questions: discovering interests (7–10), first competitions (10–13), serious preparation (13–16), and olympiads plus university-facing enrichment (16–18). Each stage links to relevant catalogue filters and guide content.
Guides and organiser outreach
Long-form guides document how national selection actually works for major pathways (BPhO/IPhO, UKLO/IOL, UKOAI/IOAI, GBEO/IEO, and others). Organisers can list events to reach students, parents, and educators actively searching for enrichment.
Trade-offs
Verification adds latency versus scraping everything automatically, but reduces misinformation on dates and eligibility. AI recommendations depend on catalogue coverage—gaps in organiser data limit suggestion quality until listings are expanded. The UK focus is intentional; country-aware calendars can extend the same structure to other regions.
Revisit
Deeper integration with Problems.cc would close the loop: recommended competitions could surface linked practice sets and past papers automatically. Expanded organiser APIs, parent alert subscriptions, and teacher cohort views are natural next steps.