In the five days since we announced Cemetech Contest #10, we have had a fantastic response from the graphing calculator programming community. A total of 11 contestants have already posted topics in our Contests subforum about their Contest #10 entries, and many more have voiced interest. To keep the ball rolling and inspire even more programmers to use some of their time to write great educational programs for graphing calculators (and win some calculators!) we have written up the full rubric that will be used to grade your programs. The programs will be graded on five criteria: the educational value of the program (55 points), the entertainment value and/or usefulness of the entry (25 points), the graphics, controls, and interface (10 points), the source code (5 points), and the readme file (5 points). Judges also have the discretion to award up to 10 bonus points to meritorious entries for special features or exceptional programs.

To help clarify the rules of the contest and to make sure we're legally covered, we have also written up a set of Official Rules. We are happy to open the contest to residents of the US, the Netherlands, Canada, and the United Kingdom. We regret that due to details of French law, we will be unable to accept entries from residents of France for this contest. Feel free to peruse the rules, linked below; there's nothing different than any previous Cemetech contest in them save for the declaration of value of the four graphing calculators we will be awarding to winners. Best of luck on the contest! If you haven't already started a topic about your entry, we encourage you to do so as soon as possible.

More Information
Cemetech Contest #10 rubric
Cemetech Contest #10 official rules

Would it be possible to enter the contest, even if one isn't eligible for a prize? After all, Germany is conspicuously absent from that list...

There seems to be line break issues at the end of the file (Windows - Chrome).

Sounds good. For the source, I thought I read somewhere here about only being applicable to ASM. You can't really to comments in BASIC, can you?

TI-BASIC comments are possible, but they slow down the game a lot.

Spence: We don't insist that your ASM has comments, either, but we're probably not going to grade your source very highly if it's a mess.

Turiq: If you can find me some information on contest law in Germany, perhaps you can even enter!

"The United States of America: residents of the 50 states only"

What about, for example, US citizens living in unincorporated US territories, or on military bases abroad?

Hey Kerm, if I'm from Australia, would I still be able to participate? I probably won't be able to win a prize, but if, if somehow I get first place, and I pay for postage, can I still get a calculator?

Elfprince: From my reading of the relevant laws, it would be too complex to include those residents.

If you can find me the relevant sections of Australian law, it might even be possible to fully include you. France requires contests to register with the government if French citizens will be entering, which is why it's excluded. I explicitly checked the other countries' laws to make sure we can accept entries from their citizens.

Oh
I thought that it was for french contests that legal registration was necessary, and foreign contests open to France wouldn't pose a problem ....

As for the bonus with grayscale, does this give Axe the advantage with that specific bonus? We see grayscale all the time in Axe but scarcely in Asm and if any in Basic. Just a thought.

You got me scared that someone would end up reporting us, and there would be a brouhaha. So it seems safer to follow the letter of the law.

Zelda: Programs will be graded with weighting given to how difficult or easy a technique is in that language. So no, using grayscale in Axe won't give you a huge bonus, because it's relatively easy. Doing grayscale in ASM would give you a significant bonus. Doing it in BASIC would also give you a bonus.

You mean the letter of the French law that applies to French contests run by French citizens/organizations.

Can you point me to the section of the law that says it only applies to French citizens/organizations? If that is indeed, I will be very happy to allow contestants like Matrefey and others.

I'm wondering how they'd even enforce it.

I'd think that, because you don't have a presence in France, all the French government would see is a package with a value of $150-300ish, marked as a gift. They wouldn't see a contest. Absolute worst thing they could do is seize the package, and more likely they would just bill the recipient importation duty.

Probably the fact that France governs France, not the whole world.

I'll add that, if I were in charge of the contest, I'd simply say that it is the entrant's responsibility to make sure that their entry complies with their local laws. (Some US contests are illegal in certain states, as well, and many contests are illegal in Quebec, but if the contest isn't being run in such a jurisdiction, or by a business with a presence in that jurisdiction, there's nothing they can do about it.)

Although I am by no means a French resident, I have to wonder, are people in France still allowed to submit an entry and see where they fall against contestants even if they can't win prizes?

I am having trouble thinking of reasons why they couldn't. I certainly would love to have their extra entries in the contest, plus their completed programs available for students to use with their calculators. To reiterate, if someone can help me find concrete information that French programmers can enter the contest without opening us up to any liability, and that responsibility for tariffs and/or punishments would lie with the contestants, I would be thrilled to be able to allow French contestants.

France governs France, not the world. It's really that simple. If the laws of each individual country affected citizens of every country, we'd all be breaking numerous laws every day and everybody on the planet would be regularly fined/jailed/executed.