Interactive Problem Solving in the Classroom: Experiences with Turing Arena Light in Competitive Programming Education

Turing Arena Light (TAlight) is a contest management system designed having in mind the needs of classroom teaching, rather than competitive programming contests. In TALight all problems are interactive by default. This means the contestant's solution for a problem will always interact with the problem, in real time. In this paper, we discuss our experience of using Turing Arena light in the course of Competitive Programming, an optional course offered to students of various LTs and LMs at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Verona. The course is meant to teach the students how to solve algorithmic problems, by teaching them the most common algorithmic techniques and data structures, and how to actively use them to solve problems.