Design Thinking with Robotics and Computational

Thinking International Competition (DrCT) 2020

GRADE 3/GRADE 4 CONTEST PAPER

NAME: Index Number:

SCHOOL:

INSTRUCTIONS:
1. Please DO NOT OPEN the contest booklet until the Proctor has given permission.

2. TIME: 1 hour only.

3. There are 24 questions:

Section A: Questions 1 to 9 score 6 points each, no point is deducted for
unanswered question and 2 points is deducted for wrong answer.
Section B: Questions 10 to 15 score 9 points each, no point is deducted for
unanswered question and 3 points is deducted for wrong answer.
Section C: Questions 16 to 20 score 12 points each, no point is deducted for
unanswered question and 4 points is deducted for wrong answer.

4. Shade your answers neatly using 2B lead pencil in the Answer Entry Sheet.

5. PROCTORING: No one may help any student in any way during the contest.

6. No electronic devices capable of storing and displaying visual information are allowed
during the course of the exam.

7. All Calculators are allowed into the exam.

8. All students must fill and shade their Name, School and Index Number in the
Answer Entry Sheet and Contest booklet.

9. Student must show detailed working and transfer answers to the Answer Entry Sheet.

10. No exam papers and written notes can be taken out by any contestant.
 Appendix A
Instructions for completing your Answer Entry Sheet (AES)
1. Use only 2B lead pencils.
2. Write your name on both side of AS. On the front page of AES, please write
your name and school name on the space provided.

3. Write your index number in the space provided and fill in the proper circle
directly below each number.

4. Write your grade in the space provided and fill in the proper circle directly below
your grade.

5. Mark only one answer to each question.

6. Make heavy black marks that fill the circle completely.

7. Write the answer in the space provided and fill in the proper circle directly below
each number. There should only be one answer for each question.

8. Erase cleanly any answer you wish to change.

9. Do not make stray marks on this AES.
10. Do not fold or staple the AES.
DrCT 2020, Grade 3/4 Contest

Section A
(Correct answer – 6 points| No answer – 0 point| Incorrect answer – minus 2 points)
For questions 1 to 9, choose the correct option and shade your option in the Answer Entry
Sheet (AES) provided.

Question 1

Alice likes walking. In order to make her way from home to school more diverse, she
plans her route in such a way that it does not share a common point with any of paths
she followed before, except for the endpoints. What is the maximum number of times
Alice can go from home to school according to her plan?

A. 3
B. 4
C. 5
D. 6

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Question 2

Keywords: - loop, division

Alice, Bob, Charlie, Diana, Emma, Fred, George, Hanna, Ivy, and Jack stand in a circle in
this order. They start counting from Alice. A child whose count is seven leaves the circle
(in this case George leaves). After that they start counting again from the child who is
next to the one who just left (in this case from Hanna), and again the seventh child
leaves the circle (this time Diana leaves). The children keep playing this game until there
is only one left in the circle who wins the game.

What is the name of the winner?

A. Alice
B. Bob
C. Ivy
D. Jack

Question 3

Keywords: - numeral system, while loop

Ryan has 97536 coins. He wants to give away most of them using the rule of 7:

He divides the number of his coins into 7 equal stocks. He donates the remainder to a
temple. Then he gives away 6 of the stocks to his 6 friends, leaving the 7th stock for
himself.

Then he repeats the process with his remaining coins until he has less than 7 coins left.
How many coins will Ryan have at the end?

A. 2
B. 3
C. 4
D. 5

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Question 4

Keywords: - queue, loop, tasks distribution

Mark and Jenny are coloring rainbows. They have one set of rainbow colored pencils. In
the table you can see how long it takes each of them to color each stripe of their
rainbows:

Color Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet

Time for 15 sec 5 sec 20 sec 35 sec 20 sec 25 sec 10 sec

Mark

Time for 30 sec 10 sec 5 sec 25 sec 40 sec 15 sec 35 sec

Jenny

Jenny picks first what color she wants to start with, then Mark can pick what color he
starts with. Once they start coloring they only continue with the next color, for example
if Jenny colored Yellow stripe, she can only continue with the Green one, and if she
colored the Violet stripe, she can only continue with the Red one. If the pencil of a
certain color is already taken, they will have to wait until it is returned to the box.

How many seconds in total Mark will have to wait if Jenny picks Green colored pencil
first and he pics Yellow?

A. 30 seconds
B. 35 seconds
C. 45 seconds
D. 50 seconds

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Question 5

Keywords: - number system, minimization

Liam is planning to go to a store to buy some candies. But he doesn’t know how much
he will have to pay, and he only likes paying the exact amount. Liam knows that candies
can’t cost more than $20. There are bills of $1, $5, and $10, as well as coins of 1c, 5c,
10c, 25c, and 50c. So Liam wants to take with him enough bills and coins to pay any
price between 1c and $20, but carry as few bills and coins as possible. How many bills
and coins in total will Liam have with him?

A. 13
B. 14
C. 15
D. 16

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DrCT 2020, Grade 3/4 Contest

Question 6

Keywords: - security, combinatorics

A string is considered as a valid email address if it matches a format

[email protected], where word1, word2, word3 consist of one or more lowercase
letters.

Alice wants to create an email address. She has four favourite substrings:

● alice@
● in
● .wonder
● land

Concatenation of two strings is a string obtained from the given two by writing the
second immediately after the first. For example, the concatenation of strings ‘.wonder’
and ‘land’ is ‘.wonderland’. It’s possible to concatenate more than two strings, for
example, to obtain ‘[email protected]’ by concatenating ‘alice@’, ‘in’ and ‘.wonder’. Note
that we can concatenate strings in different order and obtain different results. For
example, the concatenation of ‘in’, ‘.wonder’ and ‘alice@’ is ‘in.wonderalice@’ which is
different from ‘[email protected]’.

For example, ‘[email protected]’ is a valid email address, while ‘.wonderlandinalice@’

is not. Note that Alice cannot change the order of characters in any of the substrings,
she can only choose a way to concatenate them.

How many valid email addresses Alice can obtain by concatenating her four favourite
substrings in some order?

A. 3
B. 4
C. 5
D. 6

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DrCT 2020, Grade 3/4 Contest

Question 7

Keywords: - while loop

Trees in the forest need enough sunlight to sustain. To achieve that, trees that grow
close to each other should be at least 2 meters apart in their height otherwise the taller
tree will grow so that it is at least 2 meters higher. Once there are no trees with a height
difference less than 2 in the tree’s neighborhood, it stops growing. Initial heights of trees
are shown in the table, empty cells mean no trees grow there. Neighborhood of the tree
consists of all 8 neighboring cells (except for cells on the border of the grid which have
less than 8 neighboring cells).

Find the height of the tallest tree after all the trees stop growing.

21 10

19 17 24

16 18 22

15 17 20

16 18 25 13

21 23 12

A. 26
B. 27
C. 28
D. 29

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Question 8

Keywords: - editing distance

Children in school are playing the game of “broken phone”: first player comes up with a
word and whispers it to the second player. Second player whispers that word to the next
player with some error. This chain continues until the word reaches the last player.
Every time a player whispers the word to the next player one of three possible errors
occurs (except for the first player, who comes up with the word):

1. One letter disappears from the word, for example APPLE -> APLE
2. One letter gets inserted into the word, for example APPLE -> APTPLE
3. One letter is changed for another (different) letter, for example APPLE -> ABPLE

Two errors cannot unmake each other, for example if one error removed a letter,
another error cannot introduce the same letter in the same place, or if one error
changed a letter then another error cannot change it back.

First player came up with the word TELEPHONE. Which of these words can be the one
that player 6 hears?

A) TELEGRAPH
B) TYPHOON
C) LEPTON
D) TEFLON

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DrCT 2020, Grade 3/4 Contest

Question 9

Keywords: - 0-1 knapsack problem

Harry packed a trunk with some items from his old room to move to his new apartment.
But his mother accidentally took everything out and mixed them with the rest of the
things in Harry’s room. All things in the room are represented in the table below. Note
that there is only one of each item in the room.

Items Spoon Charger Mug Phone Tablet

Weight 30 g 100 g 150 g 350 g 700 g

Items Textbook Laptop Mini pool table Cat in a cage TV set

Weight 1.45 kg 3 kg 6.1 kg 12kg 25kg

Mother knows that all the items in Harry's trunk weighed exactly 17.4 kg. How many
items were in the trunk?

A. 4
B. 5
C. 6
D. 7

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DrCT 2020, Grade 3/4 Contest

Section B
(Correct answer – 9 points| No answer – 0 point| Incorrect answer – minus 3 points)
For questions 10 to 15, choose the correct option and shade your option in the Answer Entry
Sheet (AES) provided.

Question 10

Keywords: Tree, Optimization

Cory has a special counting machine. She writes numbers and plus signs between them,
then puts parentheses to determine the order of summation. The machine can calculate
all sums where both summands are numbers at once in 1 second and replaces
parentheses with two numbers inside with their sum. Then Cory can give this sequence
to the machine again and again until there is only one number left – the total value.

For example, she can write: (((1 + 2) + (5 + 3)) + (4 + 7)). After the first calculation
the machine returns: ((3 + 8) + 11). After the second calculation the machine returns:
(11 + 11). After the third calculation the machine returns: 22 which is the result. So, it
took 3 seconds to calculate the sum.

Cory wants to calculate the following sum:

19 + 23 + 74 + 52 + 31 + 45 + 96 + 78 + 92 + 10 + 17 + 24 + 32 + 25 + 64 + 37

Help her to put parentheses in a the way which requires the machine to work the least
possible time to get the total value and write the number of seconds required. It is only
allowed to put parentheses around exactly two summands, each of them must
be either an expression in parentheses or a number.

A. 4
B. 5
C. 6
D. 7

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DrCT 2020, Grade 3/4 Contest

Question 11

Keywords: - graph, combinatorics

A traveller from Uzbekistan wants to visit all neighbouring countries (namely

Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan) and return to her
country. Being in a country, she can move to any country with common state borders.
She does not want to visit any country more than once. Moreover, she is not planning to
enter Uzbekistan before the trip finishes.

In how many ways can she arrange the order of visiting all the countries?

A. 9
B. 10
C. 11
D. 12

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DrCT 2020, Grade 3/4 Contest

Question 12

Keywords: - graph, minimum cover

There are several cities in the kingdom, some of them connected by roads.

The king plans to place soldiers in some cities to protect the kingdom. However, he does
not like huge expenses on the army. A city is considered protected if there are soldiers
either in the city or in at least one of the neighbouring cities. Find the minimum number
of cities that should be occupied by soldiers for keeping all the cities protected.

A. 3
B. 4
C. 5
D. 6

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DrCT 2020, Grade 3/4 Contest

Question 13

Keywords: - optimization, sorting

Kyle has the following sequence of numbers and he wants to eliminate as few of them
as possible so that all remaining numbers are in increasing order. What is the fewest
number of numbers he can eliminate?

5, 6, 10, 7, 19, 25, 3, 44, 24, 72, 17, 31, 5, 42, 28, 56, 69

A. 9
B. 8
C. 7
D. 6

Question 14

Keywords: - Ford-Fulkerson algorithm, flow

You own a delivery company in Switzerland where your trucks deliver goods to
customers. But there are a lot of tunnels through the mountains in that country, and
every tunnel has a prescribed limit (in cm) on the height of the vehicle that can go
through that tunnel. Here is a map of tunnels between two cities A and B.

What is the height of the tallest truck that can go from A to B? (trucks can go using any
road available if their height is smaller or equal to a tunnel height limit)

A. 410
B. 370
C. 330
D. 360

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DrCT 2020, Grade 3/4 Contest

Question 15

Keywords: - numeral system, minimization

Susan wants to build a clock that would show time in binary 24-hour format. For
instance, if the time was 13:20, her clock would show 1101:10100. Susan needs to
purchase enough digits (0s and 1s) to show any possible time. It costs $2 to make a
digit 1 and $3 to make a digit 0.

How much money Susan needs to spend on digits for her clock?

A. 42
B. 43
C. 44
D. 45

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DrCT 2020, Grade 3/4 Contest

Section C
(Correct answer – 12 points| No answer – 0 point| Incorrect answer – minus 3 points)
For questions 16 to 20, write the answer in the space provided and fill in the proper circle
directly below each number in the Answer Entry Sheet (AES).

Question 16

Keywords: - graph

Amber is throwing a birthday party and wants to invite her friends. She has known every
one of her friends for some number of years (shown in the table). But some of her
friends do not like some other friends, for example, since Mary doesn’t like Ruth, Amber
can’t invite both of them and she has to choose who to invite, but Sarah likes everyone,
so she can be invited along with anyone (except Peter, who doesn’t like Sarah).

Friend Knows Amber for Doesn’t like

Bill 3 years Mary, Thomas

Sarah 1 year

George 3 years Peter

Mary 5 years Thomas, Ruth

Peter 5 years Sarah

Ruth 2 years Mary

Thomas 4 years Bill

Amber wants to invite friends so that total number of friendship years is maximal. What
is the largest number of friendship years she can achieve at her birthday party?

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DrCT 2020, Grade 3/4 Contest

Question 17
Keywords: strings, palindromes

A string is defined to be an almost-palindrome if we can make it a palindrome by

removing at most one character. A palindrome is defined as a string that can be read the
same way forwards and backwards.

Which of the following strings are almost-palindrome?

1. abbbaaabbaabbaabba
2. aaababababaaababaaa
3. abbabababaa
4. abbaababbaabba

Question 18
Keywords: binary representation

In mathematics and digital electronics, a binary number is a number expressed in the

base-2 numeral system or binary numeral system, which uses only two symbols: "0" and
"1".

For example, 3 = 2 + 1 = 11 (in binary), 6 = 4 + 2 = 110 (in binary), 22 = 16 + 4 + 2

= 10110 (in binary).

Which of the following whole number has the greatest number of “1” bits in binary?

2020, 999, 1024, 1000

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Question 19
Keywords: brackets, matching

A bracket sequence is a sequence made up of 3 different kinds of matching brackets:

Parentheses: “(“ and’)”, Brackets: “[“ and “]”, Braces: “{“ and “}”.

A bracket sequence is valid if every open bracket is matched with a closing bracket,
every closed bracket is matched with an open bracket and the interior of all matching
brackets are valid. For example, ({}) and ()[] are valid but ())(, ({]), [(]) are not valid.

Which bracket sequence(s) are valid?

1. ([]{}})
2. ([())][{}]
3. ({(}{[]}))
4.({()[]}{})

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DrCT 2020, Grade 3/4 Contest

Question 20
Keywords: grid graph, graph traversal, flood fill

Consider a square grid, where neighboring squares share a side. Some squares are
initially filled with water, while other squares are empty. An empty square will become
filled with water if at least 2 neighboring squares are filled with water. This process will
be repeated, until no more squares are filled.

This is the initial grid. Blue squares are filled, while white squares are empty. How many
squares will be filled eventually?

END OF PAPER

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Rough Working