You can often have your university IT set up a custom image for the lab machines during a contest. Most sites do this.
A good starting point is the ICPC world finals environment.
Instructions on how to build it are here.
- Webcam is not needed.
- Kotlin is not needed.
- We use PyPy3 instead of the normal Python interpreter. Please ensure it is installed alongside the normal Python installation.
- Language documentation is nice to have have is not required (it’s rehosted at sppcontests.org/contest).
Networking should be blocked with sppcontests.org/* and contest.sppcontests.org/* whitelisted.
It must be possible to easily reset the environment between the practice contest (usually finishing at 11:30 Sydney time) and the real contest (usually starting at 12:00 Sydney time), to ensure that any files created during the time of the practice contest are not available during the real contest. It is typical to set it up without a persistent filesystem, so closing and reopening it would suffice. Any safeguards to prevent accidental closing would be helpful to prevent teams from losing their work.
You will also need some way of printing files from within the environment. This can be as simple as volunteers carrying the desired file on a USB stick.