The contest is organized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the largest computing organization, and is designed as a 2-tiered process. First, teams compete in regional contests. Then, based on the regional results, some teams advance to the Finals to determine the world champion.

In 2006-2007, over 6000 teams from 82 countries competed in 31 regional contest, 88 teams advancing to World Contest Finals. It is interesting to note that there are now more teams competing from other countries than from the USA. Each team is composed of three students. The teams get a set of problems (6-10 problems) and they have 5 hours to solve as many problems as they can, with each team having only one computer. The team that solves the most problems wins the contest (in the case of ties, a penalty point system is used).

UCF is in the Southeast Region (Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi). There are usually 80-95 teams competing in our region. The UCF programming team record is provided in the table below. We have always finished in the top 3 in our region and this record is matched by no other school in our region.