Heriot-Watt University Programming Challenge 2010!

Guidelines for Teachers

Introduction

This competition is aimed at Computing students who already have some programming experience, say from Standard Grade or equivalent, and who are about to take Higher, Advanced Higher or an equivalent qualification e.g. A/S or A Level.

The competition is explicitly school[1] based, and intended to at least complement teaching for these qualifications. We envisage a fair degree of teacher involvement in the competition at local level, either in the classroom or in extra-curricular activity like a computing club.

In particular, we require competition registration and submission to be made on line by teachers, and verified independently by post by schools. Thereafter, we will be happy to provide support to teachers - we will be getting in touch later about a suggested information session here at Heriot-Watt for teachers - but we are not prepared to communicate directly with students.

We are seeking individual and group entries. We will accept at most one individual and one group entry from a school.  We suggest that teachers:

a)     support multiple individuals and/or groups locally as appropriate;

b)    select and submit the individual and/or group who, in their judgement, has best met the competition criteria below.

Effort

We estimate that it should take an individual  student no more than 15 hours to complete a competition entry that meets the minimum individual requirements.

Criteria

 We will judge entries on the following criteria:

a)     how well the entry meets the functionality for an individual/group;

b)     further innovations;

c)     the quality of programming;

d)     the quality of the report including;

• use of appropriate methodologies/tools in design/implementation/testing/documentation;
• for group entries, evidence of good practise in organisation & management;
• critical reflection on achievements and limitations.

Approach

We have deliberately not specified a programming language, to enable schools with different traditions to take part in the competition.  We hope that the challenge is as well suited to, say, logic programming in Prolog or event driven programming in Visual Basic or object-oriented programming in Java, as to a procedural programming approach. Our concern is with the qualities of the system, the programming and the approach as presented in the report.

As with any project, the key to developing a robust system that meets the specification is to base the implementation on a sound design, rather than diving in and coding.

Partial Submission

 A fully functional submission will, of course, display a participant's skills to best advantage. Nonetheless, we will consider seriously submissions that do not entirely meet the required functionality, provided that they are accompanied by an additional document that explains briefly:

• which requirements are not met;

• what should further work is  needed to satisfy the missing requirements.

Dates

Registration starts: 5th July 2010

Challenge starts: 23rd August 2010

Submission: 13th-17th December 2010

Results: 4th April 2011

Further information

Coming very soon at  www.macs.hw.ac.uk/cs/challenge, so do keep checking back.

Heriot-Watt University Programming Challenge Teachers' Workshop

If you would like to attend a teachers' workshop sometime from mid-August to mid-September on the HWU Programming Challenge please provide the following details:

Name:

Address:

Email:                                                                                    Phone:

Preferred dates and times:

Please return to: Ms Liz Andrew, MACS/CS, Earl Mountabatten Building, Heriot-Watt University, Riccarton, EH14 4AS (liz@macs.hw.ac.uk)