Contests can be a great way to give students things to do outside of class, a chance to excel and build their resumes. Contests can be roughly divided into two sorts: competitions where the goal is to do more faster than any other team, and challenges where the goal is to achieve particular milestones. On average, girls are less interested than boys in programming competitions; challenges more often appeal to both genders equally.
External Resources
I have not actually done all of these contests, and thus might have categorized some incorrectly.
Contests
- ACM Programming Contests
- CyberPatriot
- NACLO: North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad
- USACO USA Computing Olympiad.
- SECME sponsors summer engineering competitions
- ACSL contains both programming and discrete math; does have a fee. Some contests do not involve programming.
- A few are listed under the robots page on this wiki.
Challenges
- IBM Masters of the Mainframe No experience needed (of any kind).
- National STEM Video Game Challenge
Other
- GEMS club
- ISEF (Intel Science and Engineering Fair)
- The National Academy Foundation can assist in creating extra-curricular programs.
- EPICS Engineering Projects in Community Service
Comments
A good training regime for programming contests is to start with CogindBat (skip the warmups, they have answers which can confuse students), then work through the USACO problems.