The learning curves of competitive programming
Jose R. Garcia, Vanessa E. Aguirre · AIP conference proceedings · 2014
Universities around the world have implemented competitive programming as an approach to teach computer science courses. They have empirically validated this approach as a successful pedagogical tool. However, there are no conclusive results that describe the degree in which competitive programming affects the learning process of the students. In this paper, we report on the learning curves obtained from analyzing ten years of TopCoder algorithm competitions. We discuss on how these learning curves apply to university courses and can help us explain the influence of competitive programming in a class.