Assignments With Relevance Gary Hull – Spotswood High School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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