The Building of Teams During an IT Competition: Success with Combining Multiple Schools into Teams to Perform Collaborative Challenges During a Two-Day Competition.

In a majority of the competitions available for students, both high school and post-secondary, the focus of the event is on winning at all costs and the unit of competition is a team composed of students from a single institution. This isolates the team members and reduces the social impact of meeting other students, teachers, faculty members and mentors from other schools. The ITAdventures program has the serious goal of increasing interest in and awareness of information technology among high school students. However, the end of the year competition which is called IT-Olympics downplays the competitiveness in an effort to make the whole experience enjoyable. The target audience for this project is high school students, especially those students who previously have not exhibited an interest in studying IT. The authors have found that collaborative real-time challenges where teams from different schools are required to share resources and join forces on design challenges are very successful. The students exhibit more social interaction after these collaborative real-time challenges and this adds to the "party" atmosphere of the entire competition. Additionally, community was built within each of the venues by having the teams participate in the collaborative real-time challenges. This paper describes the collaborative real-time challenges implemented in the IT-Olympics competition and provides demographic and interest data collected from the students participating in the ITAdventures program. Faculty of post-secondary education in any science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) discipline recognize that nationally enrollments in science and technology are declining. Being part of an Electrical and Computer Engineering department at a land grant institution, the authors are specifically focused on the STEM topic of information technology (IT) and concerned with the downturn in the number of graduates to fill professional IT positions. The IT-Adventures program (www.it-adventures.org) is one of the authors' responses to the original "Gathering Storm" challenge to increase the number of students to pursue a degree in a STEMrelated. The IT-Adventures program, which is now in its fourth year, is an innovative program dedicated to increasing interest in and awareness of information technology among high school students using inquiry-based learning focused on three content areas: cyber defense, game design programming, and robotics. The target audience for this project is high school students, especially those students who previously have not exhibited an interest in studying IT, as well as high school teachers, not necessarily information technology teachers, who would like to enhance their skills and teaching abilities in the IT area. There are already programs available in IT-related areas such as the Lego First Tech Challenge and the Cyber Patriot Games where students who have IT knowledge and experience can gain more knowledge and can compete in the sponsored events. Those students and their programs are comparable to varsity athletes competing in a varsity sport. The students need to be very good to be able to participate. The P ge 22430.2 IT-Adventures program is modeled after an intramural or recreational sport. Every student can have the opportunity to explore IT and to learn from it, not just the ones who already excel in mathematics and science in the classroom. This wide exposure is especially important since computer-related courses are nearly non-existent in high schools across the U.S. The ITAdventures program combines educational programming, competitive events and service learning projects to engage students in learning significant IT content, as well as enhances teacher understanding and facilitation of IT experiences. The underlying tenet of the program is through increasing understanding of and excitement for IT at the high school level, the authors can increase the number of students enrolling in IT-related programs at post-secondary institutions and increase the number of graduates who will fill future IT needs. A secondary and arguably as worthy goal is to make the whole experience fun just as intramural sports participation is. Extracurricular IT-Clubs which allow students to study one, two or all three venues are formed by high schools in the fall of the academic year. Students spend the year using the learning materials provided by the IT-Adventures program, asking their own questions about the content areas, exploring additional resources and determining how to solve the challenges presented to them. The capstone event for students who participate in IT-Adventures is a two-day competition named the IT-Olympics. Students showcase the IT knowledge they gained during the past year by exhibiting a primary challenge solution they have worked on prior to the event, undertaking real-time challenges that are introduced during the competition and making presentations about their clubs’ IT-related community service projects. This paper focuses on one of the two types of real-time challenges provided to the teams competing in the two-day IT-Olympics event: collaborative challenges. In a majority of the competitions available for students, both high school and post-secondary, the unit of competition is a team composed of students from a single institution participating in the event. This isolates the team members and the social aspect of meeting other students from other schools. However, in two of the three learning areas for IT-Olympics, game design programming and robotics, the authors have found that collaborative real-time challenges where teams from different schools are required to share resources and join forces on design challenges are very successful. The students exhibit more social interaction after these collaborative real-time challenges and this adds to the "party" atmosphere of the entire competition. The authors have had a very positive response to these kinds of collaborative real-time challenges from the participants, as well as the teachers and mentors for the high schools. Additionally, community was built within each of the venues by having the teams participate in the collaborative real-time challenges. This paper is divided into 5 sections: Introduction, Description of Collaborative Real-Time Challenges, Student Data, Lessons Learned and Future Directions.