Hey everyone, I'm a university student and next year I'm going to try to get some programming competitions going at my school. I was wondering if anyone had done this before, and if they have what kind of ideas would be useful to help further people's experience for programming. I plan on coming up with some on my own, but also was wondering what kind of ideas others had. Considering the mass amount of students don't do game programming I needed something that could be more general (I guess we could do a text-adventure console game, but...). I'd like to have two types of projects... one which could be done in say a few hours (yet still test knowledge/creativity, etc) and another which would be done in say two-weeks time. It would be nice if the idea was language independent and that the difficulty level could be anywhere from Sophmore to Senior in the college level (preferably all levels could contribute, the Seniors might just be more fancy than the Sophmores). I want to promote enjoyment of programming and there wouldn't be a prize but would more give us CS majors more experience. Thanks :)

Ask google for ACM Programming Contest, its a worldwide event, based in time limited problem solving. Would be easy to get lot of examples.

Ask google for ACM Programming Contest, its a worldwide event, based in time limited problem solving. Would be easy to get lot of examples.

that's funny you mention ACM because that's the organization that i'm doing the competitions for... however these won't local or state wide competitions, but rather just competitions in our school :)

thanks for the replies, i have a good amount of time for next year, so i have plenty of time to prepare!