Though there is some empirical work on competitive assignments in the computer science education literature (Lawrence, 2004;Garlick and Akl, 2006;Regueras et al., 2008;Ribeiro et al., 2009), they generally measure student satisfaction and retention rather than the more difficult question of whether such assignments actually improve student learning.
it might be feasible to answer such ques-tions in large, data-rich virtual classrooms offered by MOOCs.