Collaborative Design and Build Activity in a CS1 Course: A Practical Experience Report

Abstract

Shaping students’ mind to structure and solve problem, in an Introduction to Programming course for first year students, takes time, leading some students to get demotivated before they actually master this new skill. This paper reports on a Collaborative Design and Build activity dedicated to reinforce students’ interest and improve their skills by sequentially solving problems in teams, through a real-life inspired scenario. Two sessions of the activity were organized during the semester. This paper carefully describes the activity design. It also presents and discusses results showing that students’ productions got more accurate across the sessions, leading many participants to outperform in solving problems in the final exam.

How Students Manage Peer Feedback Through a Collaborative Activity in a CS1 Course

“…The CDB activity (Brieven et al, 2022) is made up of two phases: the Design (solution design) and the Building phase (solution implementation). Fig.…”

“…To overcome that issue, the Collaborative Design and Build (CDB) activity (Brieven et al, 2022) was deployed in our CS1 course. That activity implements Assembly Line Learning (Rosario et al, 2020) and Team-Based Learning (Burgess et al, 2021) where peer feedback is drawn on a checklist.…”

“…To motivate that process, CDB was designed such as the reviewers need to give a feedback as clear and as precise as possible since they will have to rely on the productions they have reviewed to progress the solution. Previous work (Brieven et al, 2022) has shown that students feel motivated in taking part to CDB, due to its social dimension and its authentic aspect. CDB also appeared to boost students'enhancement in solving problems.…”