Toward improving collaborative behaviour during competitive programming assignments

Competitive gamification has been successfully used to improve the learning experience in computer science courses. Assignments based on high-performance and parallel programming contests have been shown to be highly effective to promote the interest and involvement of students. Nevertheless, during programming-contest assignments the competitive approach sometimes diminishes the usual collaboration between students to solve basic questions and common difficulties; for example, those related to the usage of the programming languages or tools. In this paper, we present an approach to integrate collaborative gamification techniques with the competitive elements of programming contests, in order to balance both aspects and to enhance the overall learning experience. The results show that this approach effectively promotes participation and collaborative behavior during a programming contest. They also reveal potential improvements that can be considered for this approach.