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Entry in progress - incomplete and forgive the formatting and grammar, etc.

As a student in junior high school, nothing affected my technological future more than the ACTE (Alabama Council for Technology in Education) computer competition. Oh, the fun times of Team Programming. I remember (and they’d admit this is true, and not just my version of events) one year sitting in the room, alone with my teammates, myself coding away in QBASIC while they jumped from desk to desk, throwing erasers and making animal like noises. That was regionals, and I believe we won that year. Other years, we usually were in a gym or other open area - just spaced apart from the other teams, and so less it was less crazy.

Many years later, it was my honor and pleasure to be allowed to judge the regional and state ACTE competitions, and to be invited back for this year’s competition as well. Now, with another ACTE on the way and without any special qualifications to do so, I’m writing my thoughts on the future of the competition.

Where we are now…

Currently the categories are as follows:

• Information Technology Test
• Multimedia
• Computer Programming
• Video Production
• General Applications
• Webpage Design
• Hardware: Robotics
• Team Programming Challenge (Group Only)

Last year at the State ACTE, judging Webpage Design, me and my partner judge had a problem.

First, we had this one girl who came from the technology school and who was learning PHP in her 9th grade (I believe?) class. She had written a database interface script that worked quite well. It was clearly her own work, written in notepad, building off what she had been taught and she presented it well. But this was not a page that you’d browse to and visit - it was the workhorse beneath it. By our rubrics, which explicitly called for graphics, with audio, video, or visual effects, we simply had to dock a good deal of points from the overall score, despite feeling like she had roughly accomplished what she set out to do and recognizing that this sort of website programming is definitely applicable to real world design.

Next, we had a team project where two artistic girls from the county school had designed an extensive personal page, putting together what amounted to their own personal portal page for them and their friends who were interested in their genre of art. The site was coded in Microsoft FrontPage and although they were very familiar with FrontPage’s workings and the FTP client they used to publish to their webserver, they had little knowledge of the HTML code being generated. They too were able to present their site well, with clarity, and a great enthusiasm for their work. But we felt understanding the code was critical, and the site was a little bit disorganized and inconsistent.

What we had was a case of two competitors in the same category, with completely different types of entries. And we felt that both had done well at achieving their goals and both goals had real-world value.

Fortunately for us, the rubrics allowed us one category of pure “impression” points and without deliberately setting out to make their scores the same, our impression points amounted to creating a tie, which was perfectly fine by the rules, and an outcome that we felt was fair and appropriate.

Lastly, we had a group that had done exceptional work. They were using Notepad and Photoshop, creating XHTML compliant code with gradient faded headers and sidebars. So their project was in yet a third category. Neither pure scripting like PHP, nor very rich on actual content (at least, not as much as the two artistic girls), but they clearly demonstrated a full competency with HTML/CSS design and website organization and function.

Futher, with the real world migrating their applications off of the desktop and onto the internet, it’s soon inevitable that students will soon be (if not already) submitting applications running off of an internet platform, rather than Microsoft’s Windows. So are they General Applications or Websites? For the moment, let’s say they’re General Applications. As other applications are judged on criteria that include the interface, so must internet applications, which means that they will be held responsible for their knowledge of HTML as well.

Category complications will continue when websites using video podcasts become ubiquitous, and become even more confusing when a custom script is the hallmark of the website’s video playback or organization system.

With all these overlaps, you might think the rules allowed for one project’s entry into multiple categories, but this is not the case. If a person or group had fully produced a video podcast, coded the HTML/CSS/RSS for the site, and included a widget that can be run as an Application on the Facebook platform, they would be forced into only one category, effectively punishing them for their completeness, although this sort of project is the kind of advanced, real-world production we should be strongly encouraging.

Where Should We Go?…

It seems to me that the obvious direction for the ACTE is to catch up to the modern movement now taking hold in software development - platform independence and cloud based computing. The internet is no longer the dealership where we browse for our vehicles (applications); it is now more fundamental - it is the road on which they drive. I believe that nothing short of a complete overhaul of the majority of categories will allow the ACTE to remain true to its goal, by promoting real-world production.

What should this category re-structuring look like? I propose we put the categories into super-categories of Design, Programming, and Literacy allowing contestants to enter each projects in up to ONE design category and up to ONE programming category.

• Design
  • Applications (judging only the functional interface, content, layout, etc; not the back-end code)
  • Internet Sites (same as above + created images, ie. HTML, CSS, basic javascripts, etc.)
  • Video Production (judging only the video and it’s production value, not the context in which it appears)
  • Overall Best Design (not sure this would be a good idea, but science fairs are able to determine an overall winner from across all their categories)
• Programming
  • Applications (judging only the back-end code of Internet Applications and General Applications. from Visual Basic to Facebook Platform scripts, from C++ to Ruby on Rails running a MySQL database. See my notes below on why I think this is the most important of benefactor from the updated categories)
  • Hardware (judging the code that works the devices, with some points alloted for the devices design, however, this is not the focus)
  • Team Programming (level 3, 4, 5; as always)
  • Overall Best Programming (same as best design - not sure it’s a good idea, but science fairs pull it off.)
• Literacy
  • Computer Literacy Test (all levels)
  • Computer Skills Test (Level 1 and 2 only - to replace General Applications and to complement Team Programming. Instead of Team Programming questions, students will be given practical tasks to accomplish (eg. Create a Microsoft Word document, format it such and such, adjust it so and so… and then two or three more questions, with the resulting files saved and submitted via similar methods to team programming). This would be held during the same time block given to Team Programming.