About Program52

Welcome to Program52 - a series of weekly coding puzzles awaits you! Whether you're a beginner programmer looking for fun activities to hone your skills or someone with more experience, just looking for some relaxed (and hopefully interesting!) challenges to get involved in, then this site is the place for you

Solutions can be written in any language and you can share your code publicly if you want to show your approach and help others

Compared to other sites, this aims to be less stressful - you can play just for your own satisfaction, or you can see how your rank on the leaderboards too

All players will be included on the global leaderboard, though you can make your profile anonymous when signing up or via your settings if you want

There are also national leaderboards and you can either create or join a private leaderboard too

Scoring

You have 3 days to complete the challenge for maximum points (5000), meaning there's no stressful rush to be logging in at some absurd time to try and complete the challenges before others to get maximum points

As a result, if someone completes the challenge within 5 minutes or 72 hours, they will both be awarded the maximum 5000 points - this will allow people to complete the challenges in their own time, regardless of timezone, schedule in real life etc

From day 3, hints will be released according to the schedule specified on that particular challenge's page. The first hint will be considered "free", though once subsequent hints are released, the points awarded for successful answers will decrease by 500 for each hint. For example, if 3 hints are released, 2 of these will reduce the total points by 500 each, hence the points achieved for an answer will be 4000

By day 7, the tips should provide an almost full walkthrough, making it easy for everyone to at least try to attempt the problem, if they were previously unsure how to approach it

More Info

For premium members, you can also download a desktop/mobile app (PWA) of the site which will allow for fast & convenient access to all the challenges

The site was primarily created to provide fun practice activities and a community for new/intermediate programmers (e.g. in high schools, early years in university), though hopefully the challenges should be enjoyable and a test for those with more experience too

If you're interested in sponsoring the site's continued operation and having your name/organisation appear throughout, you can find out more details or directly get in contact here

If you notice any bugs, have any suggestions, challenge ideas or just want to chat, then feel free to contact me

Good luck - let's see who can complete all 52 challenges!