Educational Approach and Practices for an Applied C Programming Exercise with a Poker Card Game Strategy and a Contest Style

We propose an applied C programming exercise with card game strategy and a contest style. We adopt a draw Poker and consider the rule regulation as an adequate theme of simple AI. We offer an execution environment. A student must implement a strategy program which changes a card repeatedly to make a good Poker hand. We also develop a contest management server. It manages uploaded strategy codes of each student during the contest period. It calculates a game score of each strategy by much execution. It notifies the result data and exhibits the ranking table. Contest style stimulates students' competitive volition and promotes their motivation to revise a program continuously. A teacher monitors students' progress situation in the contest period. A strategy with the best score of each student is the final product for the estimation. We carried out some educational practices since 2010. In this paper, we introduce our educational approach and features of the system. We discuss the results about submission situation and score distribution of the contest from 2011 to 2015.