Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

A new paradigm for programming competitions

2008; Association for Computing Machinery; Volume: 40; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1145/1352322.1352166

2331-3927

James F. Bowring,

Software Engineering Research

The annual ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest produces a competitive paradigm that is at odds with the pedagogical goals of modern computer science and software engineering degree programs. This paradigm stresses the fast completion of a programming task and evaluates the results solely with black-box testing specified by the judges. In contrast, the pedagogical goals of contemporary college degree programs in computing emphasize the quality of processes inherent in software development and implementation. In 2007, the College of Charleston student chapter of the ACM hosted its annual high school programming competition by turning the conventional programming paradigm on its head to focus on quality-of-process rather than time-to-complete. The judging criteria included both technical and artistic merit. The implementation of the competition emphasized success by giving students working skeleton solution programs. This paper presents the motivation for the new paradigm, the details of its implementation for the 2007 competition, and the details of the new techniques for judging technical and artistic merit.