A sports day for programming

Abstract

This paper introduces a sports day for programming, a one-day workshop, that includes ideation, design, implementation, peer review, and a Eurovision style finale. It is a summative assessment introduced to an introductory programming course for the degree Creative Technology. While the course includes both formative and summative assessment in tutorials as is common programming courses, both students and teaching team felt that students lacked programming experience to be properly prepared for their final project. Rather than adding another assessment or projects, we developed the sports day. The term sports day stresses the competitive element, the team aspect, and also that it includes different disciplines, namely ideation, design, implementation, code review and presentation. This paper explains how this setup was developed to suit the educational philosophy of the degree, how it is implemented, and reports on experiences and evaluations of this annual event.