Make Learning Fun with Programming Contests

Usually, higher education teachers have to deal with highly populated classes and low levels of motivation. Making more entertaining courses is a good way to overcome these limitations. But, how can fun and entertainment be introduced in a course which is mainly based on a final exam evaluation? We propose a new methodology based on two key ideas: (i) replacing the final exam with a series of activities in a continuous evaluation context; and (ii) making those activities more appealing to the students. We describe an e-learning experience carried out in a second-year programming course for computing majors. The activities are designed as on-line programming competitions, where all students participate and are able to see their global ranking. Experimental results show the effectiveness of this approach. On average, the dropout rate decreased from 72% to 45% while the pass rate doubled.