Impact of programming language on success in high school programming contests (abstract only)

Programming contests have been used at the high school level to motivate students to study computing and generate excitement about computing topics. However, little investigation has been done into whether the selection of programming language impacts success in such contests. This poster presents the results of an analysis of five years of high school contest results held at Western New England University. The analysis looks at the languages used by winning teams and number of submissions. Results appear to indicate that winning teams use Java and Python for programming languages while less successful teams use BASIC, VisualBasic and C++. Interestingly, the majority of teams used BASIC as their programming language. Another interesting result was that low performing teams tend to have a disproportionately large number of submissions.