Registration Instructions

Choose a username and (SEPARATELY!) a screen name. The username must be unique and may only contain letters, numbers, dashes and underscores so no email addresses and NO spaces! You will use it as your login id.

The screen name will appear on the forum and the leaderboards, so it is public. Please don’t use anything that will identify you, could embarrass you or that gives away your username.

You should not use any personally identifying information in either of these fields as they will be stored in our system.

Choose a secure password, ideally using a password manager so you can’t forget it! Please make sure that your password manager associates this password with your username NOT with your screen name.

In the next step we ask you to enter a real email address we will use if you want to reset your password in the future. WE WILL NOT BE STORING THIS EMAIL ADDRESS, JUST A HASH OF IT but if you need to reset your password we will use it to check that the email address you use for the reset is the same as the one you told us about here. (If you don’t know about hashes then go and look them up, they are VERY clever and an essential part of cyber security.) Please make sure that this email address will work and that you remember it. For security reasons we will not be able to reset your password without it.

In step 3 If you choose to create a new team then you will be asked to give it a name. The team name will appear on the leaderboards so you can track your progress, but that means it is public, so please don’t use anything in it that might offend or embarrass, and certainly do not include anything in the team name that could identify any of the team members.

Unlike the username and screen name this can contain spaces, but there are still restrictions on the characters you can use, so please read them carefully and stick to them.

If your teacher has registered on our system, they should have a Team Monitoring PIN that they will find on the School Teams tab in their user account. If you enter that PIN here, then your teacher will be able to see how well you are doing in the competition, and should also be able to help administer the team.

The team name will be used publicly, so again don’t use anything that will cause embarrassment or give away private information like your name.

In step 3 If you choose instead to join an existing team rather than set up a new one yourself then you will need the PIN number and password for the team. You can ask your teacher (if they set up the team) or the team captain for this information and enter it here.

If you are the first person to join the team then you will be designated as the captain and it is your job to submit the answers each week. If you would prefer for someone else to do that then you can invite them to sign up to your team using the PIN and Password, and then delegate the captaincy to them.

If you are the team captain then you will be able to see the team PIN and Password on the team tab in your account page. You can share that with anyone you would like to have join your team.

In step 4 we will collect a small amount of information about you. In the first two boxes we ask for information about your school, that we will use to generate your certificates and generate school and regional leaderboards. This information is stored in your user account, but will be deleted at the end of the competition.

You can leave the school box blank if you are homeschooled or if you prefer not to tell us.

in the last two boxes we ask for your sex at birth and your age, purely so we can learn something about our audience.

We use this to monitor diversity and we record the information separately from your account and only in aggregate so there should be no privacy issues, but feel free to leave them blank or select “Prefer not to say” if you want.