WSSU CREU

The improvement of academic performance in introductory programming classes is an ongoing mission of the curriculum committee in the Computer Science Department at Winston-Salem State University. Across the country every year a high volume of students fail their introductory programming courses, or complete them with substandard knowledge. This project seeks to address that problem by revisiting an intervention that was previously introduced but not quantitatively studied for significant results. This intervention introduces competition via programming contests in the courses as a means of assessing students problem solving and programming skills towards improve academic achievement. Why revisit the intervention now? During the last academic year while actively involved in another CREU research project, we noticed on several in class assignments that the students started to compete for rights to who wrote the best program. There were not any tangible incentives involved. Later, we observed the test scores of students who had previously done poorly improved. At first I thought this was just a coincidence but it happened again in another section of the course. Therefore, we believe the concept is worth revisiting. The aforementioned reasons are the motivation for this project.