Teaching Integer Programming by Scheduling the Belgian Soccer League

Abstract

This paper presents a didactic approach for teaching integer programming starting from a real-life case on scheduling the Belgian soccer league. We share our experiences as well as didactic resources for two teaching formats. The first format involves hands-on exercises and is more appropriate for small student groups (up to 40 students). The second format is an interactive lecture that focuses more on current research challenges and is better suited for large student groups. During the last decade, both formats have been used repeatedly with consistent, positive feedback from students. The combination of a hands-on, interactive approach that actively involves students with the particularities and experiences of solving a real-life case makes our approach unique and positively affects students’ attention. History: This paper has been accepted for the INFORMS Transactions on Education Special Section on Cases Based on Real-World Projects from the INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics. Supplemental Material: The supplemental material is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/ited.2022.0269 . The spreadsheet exercises file and solution files are available at https://www.informs.org/Publications/Subscribe/Access-Restricted-Materials .