IEEE @ SU Programming Competition

After participating in IEEEXtreme, I got the idea for us to host our own Programming Competition sometime next semester. It would be 2-3 hours long with small gift card prizes ($25,$15,$10 etc). It would be a series of shorter problems of different difficulty and point values, unlike the most recent IEEEXtreme where all questions were pretty tough and required about an hour to two hours each to solve. I'm thinking that the parent branch would help pay for the prizes, considering it is an academic-based competition. If this gets a lot of positive feedback and funding from the parent branch, we could even end or start the event with free pizza or something for competition participants. It would be a great way to get CS/CE majors to join IEEE as well, which we always seem to be lacking.

Here are some things we would need to take into consideration:
- Budget (prizes)
- Advertising
- Room reserving (somewhere in sci-tech)
- Rules
- Programming Problems
- Programming Problem graders (there will be A LOT of code to grade)
- Competition supervisors (to make sure no one is cheating by copying code off google)

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.. especially when it comes to competition supervisors and graders.

It wouldn't really be that hard to plan. Anyone have any feedback about this sort of event?

Thanks,
Grant

Awesome idea Grant! I will bring that up at the November section meeting with the parent branch.

Good idea. Would it be team based or individual?

The competition would be on an individual basis due to the short amount of time it would probably be. However, I've been leaning more towards a Hackathon than the competition because the participants would get far more out of it. You typically design and implement a program/script/addon/etc of some sort in a hackathon, which is far more fun and beneficial to one's resume than a small competition. The hackathon would also be easier to run because it wouldn't require any prizes. Pizza during the hackathon would be a nice incentive, but isn't entirely necessary.