Reviewing cs1 materials through a collaborative software engineering exercise: An experience report

Abstract

Many courses incorporate exercises at the end of the semester to help students review course topics. In computer science courses, review activities are often small coding problems, interactive games, or review lectures. In this paper, we describe our experience with replacing student-led review presentations with a collaborative software engineering exercise to serve as a review of CS1 programming concepts. The objective of this review exercise is to increase engagement and self-reflection on course topics by engineering a real-world software application to help students review programming concepts and prepare for the subsequent CS1.5 course. During the final two weeks of the course, students spend three class sessions working to complete the comprehensive exercise. During the final class session, each team presents its software. In this paper, we describe the comprehensive exercise, lessons learned from the past eight semesters (over 1,400 students), and suggestions for adopting the comprehensive exercise in other CS1 courses.