Tournament play in CS1
Roy P. Pargas, Joe C. Lundy, John N. Underwood · 1997
This paper describes the fifth programming assignment given to three CS1 sections in the Fall semester of 1995. The assignment was to design and implement in Ada a program that plays the game of Nim. The students' programs were to accomplish two goals: (1) play and defeat the instructor's Nim playing program, and (2) participate in a course-wide computer-Nim tournament. This paper explains how the assignment was presented to the students, how the game playing programs were developed and evaluated, how the tournament was conducted, the results of the tournament, and an evaluation of the whole exercise.