Work in progress - student conference papers as a motivating tool

Initially, some distributed systems concepts are difficult to grasp for most computer science (CS) students. In order to help them to develop a deeper understanding, we introduced in our course a combination of lectures, hands-on experimentation and writing. Before students get engaged in the final course project, we ask them to write a technical paper. Students are further encouraged to submit it to a CS conference. They are exposed to all aspects of preparing a paper until they have a camera-ready version. After we accept the paper, students have to implement a prototype of their proposed solution. In this work in progress we provide the details on how the writing activity improves the quality of the project. As preliminary results the first two student teams submitted their papers to the JAIIO´06 (Argentine computer science conference) and won the first and second price of the students´ paper track. This motivated our next student cohorts and now, ten student teams are waiting for the call for papers for the next JAIIO, with their material including first rate prototypes ready.