I am Alex Schwendner, age 14, and I would be in 8th grade. I say that I 
would be in the 8th grade because I have never been to school; I am 
homeschooled. This will be my first year at the USACO camp.

My first significant experience with programming was in 5th grade when I 
attended a short robotics day camp. There I built a number of robots and 
then, afterwards, I programmed them in LOGO. On the last day, minutes 
before the open house where we would show everyone the robots that we 
had built, it was discovered that the disk that my program was on had 
been corrupted, and I had to rewrite the program on the spot. In 6th 
grade, I received a computer program called "Learn to program BASIC". 
After learning BASIC, I became interested in HTML and JavaScript. The 
largest thing that I programmed in JavaScript before I moved on was an 
object-oriented sliding toolbar system that I used to make a complex 
DHTML web page to be used as an Active-Desktop background. Last summer, 
I attended a C++ summer camp at TIP (Talent Identification Program). I 
learned a lot there, and when I came home, I learned what we had not 
covered at my summer camp about the C++ language, and I spent my time 
writing interesting computer programs to do anything from playing chess, 
to finding all of the prime numbers up to 2,000,000,000, to sorting 
200,000,000 numbers into ascending or descending order.

Then, from a post on the MATHCOUNTS web site by Vladimir Novakovski, I 
learned about USACO, and for fun, I entered the first Internet round of 
USACO, not thinking that I would do particularly well. I started with 
the orange division; however, I quickly finished all of the problems in 
that division. As I had not looked at the problems in the green 
division, I emailed Rob Kolstad who allowed me to switch to the green 
division (none of the problems were the same on that round) and I came 
in 13th in the green division. Since then, I have competed in the other 
rounds of USACO and worked on the training gateway, although I still 
write other computer programs for fun.

Aside from USACO, I am also doing a number of math competitions 
including MATHCOUNTS Nationals, USAMO, and ARML (in Iowa). My minor 
interests include chess, as well as juggling, and fencing. I will be 
bringing a chess set and juggling clubs to USACO (although not any 
fencing equipment, as it might scare the cows).

Alex Schwendner