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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?"
This isn't how to set up a computer copetition. It's a true story from ~6 years ago when I was at one in high school.
At the local commmunity college they had a science and math day every year and there was a computer programming category. After the opening ceremony the students were being led to the different types of labs where they could compete.
Let me first say that at the time Windows 3.11 was state of the art (Ok, Mac's were but we weren't using them) and the AP computer classes used Pascal as the language of choice. It changed the next year or so to C or C++.
Back to the story, as we were walking most people were talking. For no reason everyone when quite except fo this one guy who said "God programs in QBasic."
That's it. Kinda weak when I re-read it but it was funny as hell at the time. Not that we were experts. We knew that we didn't know much relativitly speaking but we knew God didn't use QBasic.