A New Collaborative Paradigm of Computer Science Student Contests: An Experience

For more than 30 years now, the hallmark of competitions in Computer Science has been the time-to-complete programming contest. Though its success is indubitable for some students and some objectives, lately new paradigms have appeared, aiming at reaching more students, more Computer Science areas, and more learning objectives. This paper reports on and reflects about our academic experience with our Computer Science competition, spanning on more than three decades. The focus is on its evolution and continuous adaptation to current learning needs, goals, and contexts. The last paradigm has a free format, is fun- and skill-oriented, and aims at boosting students’ creativity and learning. The competition is based on the three-words-from-a-hat challenge and starts with the teams choosing three words from a hat, these being the keywords to be covered by the developed software application. We explain here the motivation of shifting from the traditional way, the new paradigm’s core ideas, while highlighting the lessons learnt. Having assessed it for two editions already, we can provide some conclusions on its impact on team-based competitions. Our main finding is that it inspires students to work with new ideas, to build up on their strengths and to work on their weaknesses, whilst competing for both fun and success, along with their peers. The demographic of the contest has also changed, with more girls entering competition each time. In our common view, both students and academics, the main benefit of this new paradigm is increased learning of both domain knowledge and soft skills.