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Assignments With Relevance

Improve the scoring system by creating a scoring application for a programming competition at Spotswood High School. Students develop real-world skills through Microsoft Visual Basic. Exciting incentives and student presentations included.

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Assignments With Relevance

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  1. Assignments With Relevance Gary Hull – Spotswood High Schoolghull@spotswood.k12.nj.us

  2. Background • Where I teach • Spotswood High School • Approximately 700 students • Many students involved in extracurricular activities • What I teach • Computer Applications and Programming I and II • Honors Programming • Honors Networking • Advanced Placement Computer Science

  3. Mr. Spotswood Pageant • Overview • Pageant for Senior guys • 12 compete in four different events • Problem encountered • Scoring was paper-based and was tabulated manually • 576 scores had to be tabulated • Long wait between competition end and winner announcement

  4. Mr. Spotswood Programming Competition Assignment • Goals • To make the score calculation more efficient and accurate through the use of a scoring application • Introduce students to real-world application development skills • Overview • Teams of 3 Honors Programming students compete against one another • Use Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 to create a scoring application • Deliverables • Application Proposal • Mr. Spotswood Application • Application Presentation • Incentive • Winning team members receive gift certificate to local electronics store

  5. Mr. Spotswood Programming Competition Assignment – Student Introduction • Before work is started • As a class, we go through the Mr. Spotswood Application Requirements/Deadline document • This document gives students • An overview of the Mr. Spotswood pageant • The basic requirements of the application • Students are expected to gather all requirements through interviews with key stakeholders • A description/timeframe for all deliverables required • An idea of how their grade is calculated • A description of the incentive

  6. Deliverable #1 – Application Proposal • Description • The proposal details • The application requirements • How the system will meet those requirements • Encourages students to prototype their application quickly using VB • Allows me to ensure that students are off to a good start • Timeline • Due ~1.5 weeks after the assignment is discussed • Format • Word document incorporating Visual Basic screenshots

  7. Deliverable #2 – Mr. Spotswood Application • Description • Students spend the bulk of their time on this deliverable • What does it do? • The application is used by a judge to enter in all contestant scores • The application then tallies and sorts the scores in order to create the winner lists • Ultimate goal is to reduce score compilation time to 0 • New features of the programming language (VB) are introduced on a daily basis • Introduced within the context of the assignment • Helps the material become more relevant to the students • Timeline • Due 4-5 weeks after the assignment is initially discussed • Format • VB Project/standalone executable

  8. Deliverable #3 – Application Presentation • Description • Students present and try to “sell” their application to a team of judges • Judges use a pre-designed scoring rubric to “grade” the applications • Timeline • Due at the end of the assignment • Format • Oral presentation using PowerPoint

  9. Outcome • High degree of student involvement • Study halls, lunches, after hours spent programming • Skills Built • Programming/Application development • Greatly enhanced skill set • Teamwork • Sales/persuasiveness

  10. Future Enhancements • Partner with local electronics store (Best Buy) • Database interaction • Distributed processing • Palm Pilots for judges • Web front-end

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