What is the Project Hoshimi Programming Battle?
The Project Hoshimi Programming Battle is a competition (exclusively for US high school students) that brings together an imaginative background story, comic-style graphics and fun programming challenges allowing students to compete online, with students from all over the country. Student will devise strategies and write code for navigating a team of nanobots through life-saving missions and objectives through a map of the human body.
This is a great opportunity for your students to learn the basics of game programming while further building their programming and problem-solving skills. Students will get the thrill of competing and interacting with students from across the country. We know that as Computer Science teachers, you’re always looking for new ways to get and keep students engaged. Whether they compete or not, your students will have lots of fun and learn a lot about things like algorithms and object-oriented design concepts as they work with the Project Hoshimi SDK.
How does the competition work?
Teams of 1-2 students will write programs in Visual Basic 2005 (VB 2005) or Visual C# 2005 (C# 2005) to create an artificial intelligence strategy using the provided Project Hoshimi Software Development Kit (SDK). Once the submission period opens, teams will submit their entries to be scored and ranked (against other entries). Each team entry will be uploaded to a scoring server that will run the executable (DLL) file. The entries will then be ranked highest to lowest based on the success rate of the nanobots performance of prescribed tasks like evading enemies, collecting objects in the map, and achieving the mission objectives. The competition is open to US high school students 14 to 18 only. Each team must have faculty sponsor from their school.
How can you help your students get started?
The Project Hoshimi Programming Battle presents a great opportunity to teach students about game programming concepts like binary trees and min-max. To make it easier to introduce these concepts, we created a set of Teaching Objects that use the Project Hoshimi SDK. Each Teaching Object includes a technical article on the topic (for background), PowerPoint slides, sample code and exercises. You will be able to find the latest Teaching Objects in the MainFunction Project Hoshimi Resources library. All of these Teaching Objects and the Project Hoshimi SDK are compatible with both the full version of Visual Studio and Visual Basic 2005 Express.
Daryll McDade
[email protected]