[Linux-aus] DE&T Programming Excellence Awards

[Jacinta Richardson]

G'day everyone,

First of all, please feel free to forward this email to everyone and anyone who 
you feel may want to contribute feedback.  Secondly, I'm not subscribed to the 
Linux Australia mailing list, so if you reply there, please consider CCing me if 
you feel it will be useful.  Finally, I'm sorry about the cross-posting, please 
consider removing some of the addresses in your reply.

The DE&T Programming Excellence Awards have run successfully with support from 
DE&T and Microsoft for several years.  A major criticism of the award has been 
the single language restriction: projects had to be written in MS Visual 
Basic.Net.  Apparently this was due to contractual reasons which no longer apply.

Earlier this month Adrian Janson, the new VITTA president, Renee Houreau, an 
executive officer and Phil Callil, vice president contacted Con Zymaris about 
OSIA involvement.  VITTA would like to open the award to include an open source 
language for 2007 with more in 2008 and beyond.

In previous years the competition has had three categories of entry: novice, 
intermediate and open.  All students in the novice and intermediate categories 
receive certificates on successful completion of the task.  For open entries, 
the single best from each school was submitted to the state-wide competition.  A 
judging panel consisting of a Microsoft representative and a VITTA 
representative then short-listed these to 10.  The short-list programmers were 
interviewed and this decided the final ordering.  Awards were officially 
announced at the VITTA conference in mid-November.

All of the top 20 entries receive cash prizes (to a sum total of $15000) with 
first prize being $4000.

In the past DE&T and Microsoft have funded the competition to cover
	* costs of providing training
	* producing training/competition materials
	* management costs and
	* prizes.

In particular Microsoft has provided $15,000 for prizes, various training 
materials or software as required, copies of VB.Net Express Edition for each 
student entering the competition and 1 judge.

There is the expectation that any new stakeholders coming into the program 
should provide comparable funding, and another judge.  This funding may take the 
form of in-kind services or products.  Prizes could also be hardware or 
software.  In return the training materials, web site, student flyers and other 
competition materials will carry appropriate advertising.

With respect to training; this needs to cover teachers in metro and regional 
areas so that they are able to adequately assist students with the competition. 
  In the past this has taken 3 metro and 4 regional one-day sessions.   It 
doesn't appear that an understanding of the programming language as such is 
covered as much as how one might solve the given tasks in that language.  VITTA 
is happy to arrange teachers to provide the actual training, but will need 
access to (or assistance in creating) training materials.

Training for the teachers needs to start by early July.  The competition opens 
from this point and ends in September.

Information for 2006's competition can be found at: 
http://www.vitta.org.au/awards/progawards.php
2006's challenges can be found here:
http://progawards.openlab.net.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=23&Itemid=39

I do not know whether the plan is to have the students work on the same projects 
in different languages, or whether we'll be able to contribute to the projects. 
  This may affect which language we recommend.


So we have some questions:

Who wants to be involved in this?
Without devolving into a language war, which programming language do we want to 
support?
What can we offer as prizes?  (Suggestions for funding?)
How are you willing to help?

Perl Training Australia is happy to be involved on the training side of things 
if we choose Perl.  Unfortunately I'm not certain whether Perl is a good choice 
for the project.  The VB challenges are all focussed around pretty interfaces 
and I'm not convinced we can cover requisite teacher knowledge for both Perl and 
a Perl graphical layer in one day.  I suspect that in order for our involvement 
to be successful we may need to pick something which has a similar WYSIWYG 
window creation as Visual Studio gives VB.net, or we need to redefine the 
projects to work via a web browser.  I want to avoid the situation where 
students avoid doing the project in the open source language because it's a lot 
harder.   We need pretty but manipulatable... any ideas?

All the best,

	J