Competitive evaluation in a video game development course

The importance of the video game and interactive entertainment industries has continuously increased in recent years. Academia has introduced computer game development in its curricula. In the case of the University of Cadiz, a non-compulsory course about "Video Game Design" is offered to Computer Science students. In the artificial intelligence lesson, students play a competition to earn part of their grade. Each student individually implements a strategy to play a predefined board-game. The different strategies compete in a software environment that implements it. Grading this part of the course depends on the results obtained in the competition. Additionally, before running the competition, students have to read the source code written by their classmates and bet a part of their grade on other teams' results. This way, they elaborate a critical analysis of the source code written by other programmers: a very valuable skill in the professional world. Students that are not so proficient in coding are still rewarded if they demonstrate they can do a good analysis of the source code written by others.