[elearning] Fwd: NCSS Challenge 2013 begins August 5th

[Roland Gesthuizen]

G'day fellow Vic IT teachers,

The NCSS challenge is really with joining. Details are below. Register ASAP with your students.

We had a great time doing this last year for year 11 and 9, involving all the students into our IT classes. Repeating it again for 2013. The organisers offer oodles of online and realtime help and teachers can even get to learn some programming along the way, especially with the new Python 3 programming language.

It was so cool for a change to hand out some IT certificates at a school assembly. I was really pleased that some of the girls went on to do year 12 IT :-)

Go for IT

Regards Roland @rgesthuizen

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Nicky Ringland <challenge at ncss.edu.au>
> Date: 10 July 2013 5:40:54 PM AEST
> To: undisclosed-recipients:;
> Subject: NCSS Challenge 2013 begins August 5th
> 
> Hi CS4HS teachers!
> 
> The National Computer Science School Challenge 2013, run by the University of Sydney, starts on August 5th for 5 weeks until 9th September.  In the Challenge, students (and teachers) learn how to program while they compete.  Last year we had over 4200 high school students (and some primary students) and 330 teachers from 420 schools compete in the Challenge.  This year we're hoping to more than double that number, and we need your help to reach 10,000 students this year!
> 
> Many of you have enrolled your classes, and sometimes even whole school years, in the NCSS Challenge.  We would really appreciate it if you could encourage your colleagues to take a look at participating in the Challenge this year. The first part of the Beginners' stream is now available for free, so teachers and students have a easy way to experiment with the content and judge if it's right for them.
> 
> Watch out for the NCSS Challenge poster and letter to teachers, sent to the "head computing teacher" in every high school in Australia in the last few days.  Just in case you miss that, I've included more details below.  Also, we've made some changes for 2013, so if you've done the Challenge before, you may still want to read the New in 2013 section below (especially the change from Python 2 to Python 3).
> 
> We look forward to seeing you and your students in the Challenge!
> 
> What is the NCSS Challenge?
> 
> The NCSS Challenge is an online programming competition for (high) school students and teachers. Unlike most other competitions, we don't assume the students already know how to program, instead students develop their Python programming skills over the 5 weeks of the Challenge.  Each week, we release learning resources suitable for either in-class or self-directed learning, covering many aspects of programming including: variables and data types; if statements; while and for loops; algorithms; file I/O; functions; code reading and debugging; and code style and comments.  The number and pace of the concepts covered varies between the three streams of the Challenge: beginners, intermediate, and advanced.  Enrolment in a stream costs $20 per student (including GST). This can be paid by students individually via PayPal, or your school can be invoiced for them as a group. Students generally spend a few hours a week to complete all questions, although this varies depending on which stream they are enrolled in.
> 
> A set of 5-10 interesting and fun problems (the 'challenges') are released at the same time which test the new material for that week and consolidate understanding of the previous weeks' material.  The difficulty of the problems varies between the three streams of the Challenge.  Each week's problems also range in difficulty: starting with problems testing the previous week's material, then introducing the new concepts in simpler questions, and finally combining the concepts together.  A student who cannot complete the final question for week X, will still be able to solve some of the simpler problems for week X+1 (so they shouldn't feel disheartened if they can't solve the last problem from each week, there will definitely be things they can solve the following week).
> 
> Participants submit their solutions to our web-based intelligent auto-marking system which checks the correctness of their program against a battery of test cases. These test cases are designed to lead the student through solving the problem where possible, and encourage them to think about thorough testing. Points are awarded for solving each problem and there is a small penalty for making a large number of submissions to discourage resubmitting without thinking!
> 
> Submissions close for a particular week's questions on Sunday evening.  At 9am on Monday, the solutions, hints and commentary to those problems are released, along with the notes and problems for the following week.  Students are still able to submit answers to problems and have them auto-marked after the solutions are released, but they no longer receive any points for getting them correct.
> 
> For more information about the Challenge, see our website.
> 
> NCSS Challenge streams
> 
> There are three NCSS Challenge streams: beginners, intermediate and advanced.
> 
> Beginners is an introductory course suitable with no prior programming experience. This stream is most suited to students in junior secondary or late primary school (11 - 16 year olds) or anyone who wants to start with the basics.  It covers variables, user input, strings, integers, floats, lists (arrays), if statements, and for/while loops. Beginners has 10 problems per week – but the problems are quite similar to each other conceptually (they look different, but emphasise the same underlying concepts).  So it is a bit more like programming drill – but fun!
> 
> Intermediate is designed for students who either have completed the Beginners stream in a previous year, or have some other prior programming experience (in Python or another programming language). This stream is targeted at students in middle secondary school and above (14 - 18 year olds), but advanced junior students will also enjoy it!  It covers dictionaries, files I/O and writing functions in addition to the concepts in the beginners stream. 
> 
> Advanced is designed for students who have either excelled at the Intermediate stream in a previous year, or are already experienced programmers.  This stream is aimed at students in senior secondary school (16 - 18 years) or extremely talented junior students.  Advanced contains very tough problems for experienced Python (or other) programmers, and introduces additional material on regular expressions, recursion, parsing and object-oriented programming.
> 
> Which Python stream is appropriate for your class?
> 
> My recommendation is that if you've got Year 5-8's doing the Challenge, go for beginners.  If you've got a weaker class of Year 9-10 students with no exposure to programming, beginners might be appropriate.  If you've got a class of stronger students, or those with some experience in something like Scratch, or similar programming environments, you might prefer the additional content of intermediate.  It also depends on how much time you have to spend on going through the notes with the students before they attack the problems.  Other schools discuss the problems at an algorithmic level (not the actual code required) and then the students program them up.  This extra support can make intermediate more accessible.  Finally, advanced is really designed for students who have conquered everything in intermediate without breaking a sweat!
> 
> If you have a class with a great range in ability and interest, you might like to choose a mixed strategy – putting some students in beginners and others intermediate.  Some students sign themselves up for multiple levels at once.  Another option is to start your class on beginners, and if they are handling things easily, we can move some of them to intermediate sometime during the second week (so they still have time to get all of the points for week 2).  If you'd like to do that, please email challenge at ncss.edu.au or contact us through the messaging system and we'll make the adjustments.
> 
> To give you some idea of completion rates: last year, 100% of students attacked the first couple of questions in intermediate, but only 65% solved the last problem in week 1. Then 87% of students solved the first problem in week 2, dropping back down to about 66% for the last question in week 2.  In the end, over 50% of the students completed some of the intermediate questions right through to Week 5.
> 
> When does the NCSS Challenge run?
> 
> The Challenge starts Monday 5th August and will run for 5 weeks. Questions and resources will be released at 9am on Monday morning and the solutions need to be submitted by 8:59pm on the following Sunday for beginner's and intermediate, and 11:59pm Sunday for advanced.  The first week is our 'friendly week' and so there are no points for solving the problems. This gives participants a chance to install and run Python on their own machines, and get used to our online testing system, and judge which stream they should compete in. It also means it is possible to sign up at any time next week without being disadvantaged at all (or even part way into week 2 of the Challenge).
> 
> How do I enrol my class and how much is it?
> 
> As well as individual enrolments from students and teachers, we have a bulk enrolment option for schools which allows a teacher to either manually enter a whole class or upload a CSV file of names and email addresses.  This can then be paid in one go either via PayPal or through an invoice to the school.
> 
> The cost is $20 per participant (student or teacher) per stream including GST.  There is a $30 yearly subscription available that gives students or teachers access to all three Challenge streams, and all other courses and competitions created by Grok Learning (see below).  We know that it can take some time for schools to collect money and send us a cheque, so we are happy for participants to start the competition before the money arrives. We will not send out certificates of participation and commendation unless the payment has been received.
> 
> Interaction on the site
> 
> Students get instant feedback on the correctness of their submissions, and the test cases give them hints as to what they got wrong.  Top performing students appear on separate leader boards for each stream – split into junior (Year 5-8), intermediate (Year 9-10) and senior divisions (Year 11-12), and this is updated as soon as students submit correct solutions.
> 
> We have online forums for general topics and also for each problem, and the participants have been very helpful (whilst maintaining some spirit of competition) when others have been stuck on a problem.  There is a real community that forms during the competition, and it is great to see students connect with others who are also passionate about programming. We also have a large number of tutors who monitor participants' progress and send encouragement and hints via a messaging system within the site.  Help is almost always moments away – in fact, often we will have answered a question before a teacher would have had time to move across the classroom and answer it in person!
> 
> Teachers in the Challenge
> 
> Some teachers enrol in the Challenge for their own professional development or just the fun of conquering the problems themselves.  Teachers can see both a summary of the performance of their students in each stream the students are enrolled in, and inspect all of their submissions.  Some schools have used the Challenge as an in class activity for 5 weeks, others have created lunch time clubs for working on problems, while others still have just set them as fun after school extension material for gifted students.  We have been particularly pleased to hear stories of students rushing to the whiteboard to discuss how to solve the problems.  In a couple of cases, we've heard of schools using some questions as assessment tasks.
> 
> There are also separate teacher only forums to discuss how your students are finding the questions and share ideas and resources with other teachers.
> 
> New in 2013: Grok Learning
> 
> The NCSS Challenge team have started a company, Grok Learning Pty Ltd.  Our goal in starting Grok Learning is to do more: more students in more countries; more intelligent auto-marking; more courses, projects and competitions running more times each year.  We will make NCSS Challenge-like courses available throughout the year (so you can teach programming whenever it suits you), and introduce many new courses in the next few months, including other programming languages, and technologies including SQL and HTML/CSS.  This will all be available through an simple annual subscription for students and teachers of $30 (signing up through their schools) or $100 (students signed up directly by their parents), which is the familiar pricing model used by Mathletics.
> 
> We have also developed an entirely new learning environment and auto-marking system.  The learning environment now allows students to edit and run programs directly in the browser (although we still strongly recommend installing Python locally, so students can write programs independently).  Each snippet of code in the notes can be run and modified.  Challenge questions are now directly integrated with the learning materials, which have been broken up into more manageable slide-sized chunks.  Hopefully students will find the learning materials less daunting now, and will be able to navigate back a few slides to find the concepts they need to solve each problem.
> 
> Finally, we have made the move from teaching Python 2 to Python 3.  Python 3 involves backwards incompatible changes in the Python language syntax.  For beginner programmers, the changes are not difficult (the most obvious change is that the print statement is now a function, and so must be called with parentheses).  Python 2 programs will be marked as incorrect by the marking system, and so you must install a new version of Python.  We recommend you install Python 3.3.2 from the Python website.
> 
> If you have any questions, please email challenge at ncss.edu.au or ring me on (02) 9036 9712 or 0407 020 099.
> 
> We look forward to seeing you and your students on the NCSS Challenge site!
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Nicky
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> 
> NICKY RINGLAND 
> Outreach Officer | National Computer Science School | http://www.ncss.edu.au
> PhD student | School of Information Technologies | Faculty of Engineering and IT
> 
> THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
> Room 444 | Building J12 | The University of Sydney | NSW | 2006
> T +61 2 9036 9712 | F +61 2 9351 3838 | M +61 407 020 099
> E challenge at ncss.edu.au | W https://groklearning.com/challenge
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