Duke Project Borg^3
http://speedyguy17.info/borg3/
What is Borg^3?
Borg^3 is a set of problems of increasing difficulty which students can attempt to solve over their time at duke. It is similar to Project Euler, but with problems more directly tailored to solving programming contest problems.
Why?
Several challenges arise when trying to prepare students to do very well in programming contests:
- There is a large range of abilities in students preparing
- New students sometimes becomes discouraged when they are unaware of basic techniques that greatly ease most problems (input, output, etc)
- Students often become overwhelmed trying to bridge the gap between trivial problems and more advanced ones
- Encouraging students to continue to progress over 4 years is challenging when the problem sets overall do not change in difficulty
- It is difficult to motivate students to solve problems outside classtime
- Students will often gloss over techniques they find challenging at first, never learning how to make that technique "easy"
How?
Project Borg^3 addresses these challenges in a way that has yet been seen in Duke programming contest preparation. Normally when contests are given, they have 8-12 problems and last for a few hours. Students will think about the problems during the set, solve the ones they find easy, maybe solve one they didn't know how to do at first, and then proceed to not go back and soslve the more challenging problems. At best, a set is up for a semester, and students will not go back and solve previous semesters' problems. By creating a static set of problems, we ensure that students have the opportunity to solve them over a much longer time span. There is no concept of "going back" to old problems since the set never changes.
By forcing the student to solve the problems in turn, we ensure that they do not gloss over any techniques they may find challenging