Achievements for building a learning community

Abstract

Twice a year the National University of Singapore hosts computer programming events open to the nation's secondary, junior college, polytechnic and technical education students. To qualify for the live events, participants complete online programming activities during a month-long qualification phase open to all non-university students over the age of 12. The activities include game-based learning and traditional coding problems. During the past year, more than 1700 students participated in the two qualification phases and more than 200 students participated in the live events. At these events, students pair-program to test their programming abilities and showcase their coded creations in a tournament format. In the accompanying poster, we describe our work to build a community of intrinsically motivated learners and develop the technical infrastructure to support them both at scale during the qualification phase and live events. We conclude by detailing our plans for leveraging the community as a site for research on learning going forward.