Engaging weak programmers in problem solving

As with many schools attracting international students, our postgraduate degrees must cater for students with diverse backgrounds and skill-levels. It is not practical to accurately assess students' domain-skills prior to enrollment. Thus, we found a need for a compulsory bridging course with the dual objectives of improving the problem solving and programming skills of the weakest computer graduates whilst still challenging and improving the skills of experienced programmers. This paper describes our experience in refining such a course over six semesters, in order to meet these goals.