The Role of Competitions in Education

I give an historic overview of education, competition, and competition within education, with an emphasis on computing science education. It appears that large-scale formalized competitions are a relatively recent phenomenon in the long history of education. I argue that in the future the role of competitions should be expanded, but that this requires more effort from all branches of society. About the author. Tom Verhoeff was trained as a mathematician and holds a doctorate in computing science. Since 1987, he is assistant professor in the computing science at Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. His main research interest is in the specification and analysis of parallel computations, and their design and implementation as delayinsensitive VLSI circuits. He has directed the European Regional Finals of the ACM International Scholastic Programming Contest (ICPC) from 1988 to 1990. In 1995, he chaired the Scientific Committee of the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). He will be 1999-Finals Director of the ICPC to be held in Eindhoven.