There are no fees associated with this contest itself, though all student participants must be registered for IEEE SoutheastCon 06.

There is a good deal of information available online about preparing for these contests. Two sites that are useful as resources for example problems are:

http://www.acm.inf.ethz.ch/ProblemSetArchive.html: The ACM's problem set archive for the ACM/IEEE Intercollegiate Programming Competition is a comprehensive source of many years' worth of regional and international contest problems.

http://acm.uva.es/problemset/: The archive hosted by the Universidad de Valladolid (Spain) is also a good resource of problems, official and otherwise, along with an online judge for you to test your code!

Please click on the "Rules" link above for information about this competition.