Finn Johnson, Elliot Thomas, Suraj G, William Woodcare
(2ND YEAR GROUP PROJECT - Honorable Mention
In today’s connected world, learning to program has a lower barrier to entry than ever before. There are many organisations such as the Raspberry Pi Foundation providing engaging and innovative ways for users to get into programming. Any programming language has great websites that teach you the language from the ground up, and in particular languages like Python have great communities supporting beginners.
But what do you do once you’ve learnt a language?
You want to build on your skills, and write more code, but where do you go?
While there are some sites that offer solutions to this problem, they often ask you to code up solutions to abstract problems alone, and so typically aren’t very engaging. Furthermore, almost all solely focus on whether your code passes test cases, and not on the quality of your solution - which is the most important aspect from an employer’s perspective.
Introducing Pamoja - an online platform where users engage in short 10 minute peer-to-peer battles where the best solution wins. Improve your coding skills by putting them to the test against other users or even your friends. As you play more and win more games your rank increases - increasing the difficulty of the problems and the quality of the opponents, so that you are always stretching yourself. Over time you will build up a portfolio of solutions, increase your global ranking and perhaps even gain the interest of employers searching the site for programmers with strong problem solving skills. Employers can also put their own problems into the wild, and see which users can create the best solutions in matches.
