With help from Novartis, the College of Computer and Information Science, my PhD students Ahmed and Bryan and numerous undergraduate and graduate students we have developed both a crowdsourcing platform for collectively solving computational problems as well as a teaching platform for learning about computational problems and building knowledge bases. We call this platform Scientific Community Game (SCG) Court. http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/lieber/evergreen/specker/scg-home.html
SCG Court is a generator of crowdsourcing and teaching systems in specific playgrounds. Currently, my Managing Software Development class is maintaining and developing SCG Court further and using it with various playgrounds. http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/lieber/courses/se-courses/cs5500/f11/msd-f11.html
In my Algorithms and Data class, my students have worked with several playgrounds, but only informally by playing the well-known quantifier game of mathematics: Landau playground, Highest Safe Rung playground, MinMaxGolden playground, BreadthFirstSearch playground, Johnson-CNF-Approximation playground etc. http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/lieber/courses/algorithms/cs4800/f11/homeworks/
Now it is time for them to implement some of their algorithms as avatars and have them compete in SCG tournaments. For this purpose we wrote an Avatar Designer Guide for Algorithms. I believe that our software is stable enough to support this endeavour safely.
I would like to request prize money to better motivate the students and make the tournaments fun. For first prize I would like to offer them a prize of a few hundred dollars.