Clavijo, S., & Oh, L., & Pochiraju, K. (2022, August), Competitions in Courses: Adding Value to Both Under-achieving and High-achieving Engineering Students  Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41651

\bibitem{asee_peer_41651}
  Clavijo, S., \& Oh, L., \& Pochiraju, K. (2022, August), \emph{Competitions in Courses: Adding Value to Both Under-achieving and High-achieving Engineering Students}
  Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, Minneapolis, MN.
  10.18260/1-2--41651

Sandra Clavijo, Louis Oh, and Kishore Pochiraju.  "Competitions in Courses: Adding Value to Both Under-achieving and High-achieving Engineering Students".  2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN, 2022, August.  ASEE Conferences, 2022.  https://peer.asee.org/41651 Internet.  18 May, 2025

\bibitem{asee_peer_41651}
  Sandra Clavijo, Louis Oh, and Kishore Pochiraju.
  "Competitions in Courses: Adding Value to Both Under-achieving and High-achieving Engineering Students".
  \emph{2022 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, Minneapolis, MN, 2022, August}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2022.
  https://peer.asee.org/41651 Internet.  18 May, 2025

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_41651
author = "Sandra Clavijo, Louis Oh, and Kishore Pochiraju"
title = "Competitions in Courses: Adding Value to Both Under-achieving and High-achieving Engineering Students"
booktitle = "2022 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition"
year = "2022"
month = "August"
address = "Minneapolis, MN"
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://peer.asee.org/41651}
number = {10.18260/1-2--41651}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - Competitions can bring excitement and energy into classrooms. They can motivate students to apply knowledge and innovate, resulting in enhanced confidence. Several professional associations sponsor extra-curricular competitions, and several engineering programs adopt the competition themes and participation into connected courses. While competitions have several positive impacts, specific issues may need to be addressed before incorporating them into classes. For example, contests tend to define open-ended and complex problems that help students out of myopically searching for that unique correct answer for every assignment. In addition, problem definitions focused on outcomes, scoping, and time management are inherent to competitions, so they provide complex problems and test problem-solving skills. The drawbacks of adopting national/global competitions within courses can be synchronizing class and competition schedules and course learning outcomes with the competition themes. Also, while competitions motivate highly achieving students, they tend to alienate and disengage groups that are not motivated. Research also indicates that competitions may not attract diverse participation.

Stevens Institute of Technology has incorporated three competitions, two of them coupled with first-year design education and one with the two-semester-long capstone design courses. The courses associated with the competition have skill-building exercises that are needed to be effective participants. The final competition participation does not carry any course credit, and the cash prizes are the motivators for the high-achieving teams. This paper describes an analysis of student performance data that tracks the correlation between course performance to competition success.
AU  - Sandra Clavijo
AU  - Louis Oh
AU  - Kishore Pochiraju
CY  - Minneapolis, MN
DA  - 2022/08/23
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Competitions in Courses: Adding Value to Both Under-achieving and High-achieving Engineering Students
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/41651
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--41651
ER  -