Video game bots as a theme for student software competitions

Software and programming competitions are attractive and educationally powerful ways to engage excelling students. They assume different formats depending on the purpose, level of preparation and background of participants. We describe a new type of student software competition organized for the 2014 IEEE SoutheastCon conference. We designed a task related to video game bots - a novel format for this contest event running in conjunction with the annual IEEE Region 3 Student and Technical conference. In addition to testing abilities and programming skills in solving algorithmic problems in a limited time, this new format emphasizes the importance of engineering aspects of the software development process, and provides a model that can be reproduced for other competitions as well as used in the classroom.