Competitions and challenges for education and continuous learning
Résumé
Involving students and trainees both in organizing and in participating in competitions and challenges is a powerful pedagogical tool. From kindergarten through the last years of graduate studies, or as a way to upskill to gain new skills on the job, competitions can gamify the learning process and thus motivate people to explore by themselves, assimilate a variety of material, and expand their capabilities. Competitions also contribute to engaging students in learning about problems of societal importance. At the graduate level, designing and implementing competitions can be seen as a hands-on means of learning proper design and analysis of experiments. In the workplace, this remains an effective way to embrace continuous learning and remain up to date as technologies, tools, and approaches evolve. In this chapter, we present a synthesis of various hands-on teaching and learning experiences using competitions as a medium. We report educational efforts conducted in kindergarten, high school, university and working environment. For younger students, competitions take more the form of individual projects qualitatively evaluated by a jury, while at the university level they take the form of automatically graded homework addressing a research problem. The application domains can be very diverse: medicine, ecology, marketing, computer vision, recommendation, text processing, etc., and students enjoy being involved in creating challenges motivated by humanitarian purposes. Within a professional or working environment, competitions are used to help with upskilling, learning new approaches, and tools that can directly be used in one's job or to update one's resume to remain relevant and competitive in the market place.
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