Abstract:

In the era of newfangled teaching approaches based primarily on new information and communication technologies, student motivation remains a crucial factor in simplifying knowledge transfer. Therefore, several new teaching styles that affect the learner's motivation factor have emerged, making teaching and learning more enjoyable. Serious games are an example of this kind of approaches.

Competitions have become a new way of skills evaluation and valorization. IT students participate in competitions autonomously to prove their skills and to be qualified to the employments of their field. The competitions are organized by educational institutions or companies in order to discover talented students to recruit them. Sometimes the competitions are taking place by third-party organizations that associate the recruiters with best ranked programmers.

In our teaching program, to attend the known changes in teaching and to evaluate this new approach, we have proceeded on two axis:
(1) The involvement of students in internal and external competitions and
(2) the integration of competitions in the curriculums.

This work presents the experience of the integration of competitions as a learning approach to software programming in the Private University of Fez. The aim is to evaluate the impact of this new approach on learning and if traditional approaches can be replaced by this approach.

Keywords:

Competition based learning, computer science teaching and learning, student motivation.