The competitions in Informatics in Bulgaria for students appeared in the late 80's of the last century. They follow the idea of math competitions, but using computers. The relevance and importance of the problem of developing and practicing skills in competition programming in students in Computer Science and related studies stems from the need of today's globalizing society of creative thinkers with a comprehensive and systematic understanding of the essence and relationship of objects, phenomena and etc. Participation in programming competitions has a positive impact on the professional development and skills of students and should be encouraged, organized and developed.

At the core of success always lays a lot of hard work and good preparation. Programming competitions are as all other competitions in terms of the preparation needed to achieve results. An athlete cannot be good without training. Solving many tasks is the only thing that can help in inventing and implementing algorithms and data structures. In addition, experience helps to overcome some types of mistakes. It remains to be solved the problem of the ability to train alone. Exploring ways to implement the idea for better training led us to the design and development of a platform for publishing training materials and tasks from different competitions, analyses, test data and authors’ solutions. In this paper, we present an analysis of the specific features of the competitions in informatics for students and the basic functional characteristics of a platform for students training.

Keywords: Programming Contests, Programming Contests Training System, Student Support.