Creating a High School Programming Competition?

goatmon asks: "A few high school computer teachers across Tennessee have organized an annual "Geek Games" competition. We started last year with a great competition in PC repair, patterned after the VICA competition. This year we are trying to expand to add a competition in computer programming. The question is, how do you create a language-independent computer programming competition? Is it fair to have a timed test if one group of kids is hacking in Python and the other in C++? And who wins, the one with the shortest code, the fastest programmer, the one with code that works? Can anyone offer insight from experience or a pattern that we might be able to follow?"

Comments

Genericise it.

[eibhear]

My suggestion to you would be to set a goal that is generic. Decide on a system that whould be built. This can be something graphics based (e.g. a simple calculator that does addition, subtraction, division and multiplication), information based (e.g. building a time tabling system), networking (e.g. a system where input occurs on a client, and processing on a server).

However, the trick is not to specify technology. In fact, you could make it quite clear that it doesn't matter what development paradigms that are used. What is important, though, is that the goal be described as something that is useful. (I remember being brilliant with my repeating print out on my ZX81, but realising that no one wants to see "Eibhear was 'ere" 10, 100, 1000 or any amount of times.)

In short, decide what you would like to be produced by the entrants, and let them decide how they do it.

With respect to judging it, you could devise a set of qualitative criteria that can easily be assessed by judges with a modicum of technical experience. Criteria could include:

• Extent of completion - how much of what was required was provided by the entry.
• Ease of use - How difficult or not is the entry to learn to use.
• Ease of access to potential users. - How many potential users are excluded or not from use due to a lack of peripheral resources (libraries, OS, hardware, etc.)
• Presentation - How good it looks.
• Perceived simplicity - How simple it seems in it's execution.
• Readability of the code - How easily some one else can understand the code as entered.
• Elegance of the programming - How "clever" or succinct the coding is.
• Ease of access to build environment - How easy and/or inexpensive it would be for some one to gather the necessary environment to build the entry from the source.

These criteria are somewhat subjective, and to ensure fairness for all entrants, there would have to be a panel of judges, like in the figure skating competitions.

Then there is a set of quantitative criteria, which would enclude:

• Disk-space taken up by deployed solution - how much disk space is required by the bare minimum of the entry to get it to run. This could include, but I would exclude, the system requirements.
• Speed of response or operation - How long would the task that is set out in the requirements take to be completed.
• Etc.

The point is to make the competition such that one geek with a linux and a C/C++ compiler and years of programming experience will not have an advantage over a kid with access to and a preference for HTML/javascript/VB/perl/etc. By making the requirements of the competition non-technical, the entrant will focus on the means best used by herself, and judgement will not be prejudicial.

Hope this helps.

Éibhear.

Language choice should be the student's task

[acidblood]

You should leave the language choice up to the students. Someone who picks C to do pattern matching and string operations instead of Perl deserves the buggy code they'll get (and the time they'll waste). Actually, this will end up enriching the contest, so far as students who learned more than one language will be able to pick the one best suited to the task at hand, a skill which can make or break a good design.