Contest-Reality as an L7+ Meta-Competency Layer: Taxonomy and Ship-Format Decision for a Competitive-Programming Pedagogy

Competitive-programming (CP) pedagogy distinguishes algorithmic content — data structures, techniques, asymptotic analysis — from contest-reality content: the metaand tactical-layer knowledge surrounding contest execution, including judge-protocol literacy, tactical heuristics for problem classification under time pressure, contest pacing, defensive coding, competitive psychology, and deliberate-practice logistics. The algorithmic stream is well-served by a mature textbook tradition [1, 2, 3] and by the Spine-Cluster architecture of prior work. The contest-reality stream is covered thinly: scattered across practitioner blog posts, the Olympiads in Informatics journal, and national-delegation oral tradition that is not documented in the Vietnamese canon. This paper (a) synthesises a six-plus-one category taxonomy of contest-reality content with category boundaries grounded in the literature, (b) proposes a vertical L7+ extension to the Spine-Cluster milestone schema (L8 contest-situated complexity reasoning, L9 tactical allocation, L10 defensive implementation, L11 self-regulated performance, L12 longitudinal deliberate-practice adherence), and (c) derives a ship-format decision for the Python Pathway textbook series recommending a standalone Volume 5 rather than a Part B appendix to Volume 4. The decision is grounded in a six-dimension framework (content coherence, reader entry point, pedagogical load, marketing positioning, instrumentation coherence, revision isolation) under which the standalone option dominates. The paper does not perform empirical validation; the output is a design artefact intended to unblock Vol 5 specification and to feed a sub-ADR on the Spine-Cluster architectural extension.