Competing in Computing

AbstractThis paper describes a study performed in conjunction with organizing a localqualification contest for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.This is an annual contest where teams of students compete against each other inwriting computer programs.The objective of the study was to see if the effort that was put into organizingthis event gave sufficient results that it warrants a continu ed participation. It wasalso a chance to evaluate how a competition can be used as a learning environment.The data for the study was gathered from having the participating students fillin a questionnaire after the competition. 1 Introduction The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) [1] is an interest group for profes-sionals in computer science which for the last 24 years has arranged “The Annual ACMInternational Collegiate Programming Contest” (ACM-ICPC) [2]. This is a competitionwhere teams of students compete against each other in writing computer programs.In this paper we describe a study that was performed in connection with the lo-cal qualifying competition for the ACM-ICPC held at the Department of Informatics,University of Bergen, Norway in 1999. This was the first time t hat the University ofBergen organized a local qualifying competition and sent a team to the regional final (in’s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands [14]).Organizing a local competition requires some effort from the faculty in terms ofspreading information, designing problems, organizing the needed hardware and soft-ware, and in terms of administering the competition itself. In addition, there is a fi-nancial cost in sending the best team to the regional final. In 1999 this amounted toapproximately 20.000 Norwegian kroners for The University of Bergen. Since both timeand money is spent on participating in the ACM-ICPC it is of interest to evaluate whatthe benefits are to the university and if these are substantia l enough to defend a continuedparticipation. This is the purpose of the present paper.Our main motivation for participating in the ACM-ICPC was tocreate a positivesocial and academic event for the students. In the Norwegian university system studentscan select courses fairly freely and are responsible themselves for combining coursesthat make up a bachelors degree. Due to this freedom there is seldom a feeling amongthe first and second year students of belonging to a certain cl ass or department. It hasbeen reported, and is also the author’s own experience, that it takes time, often several