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.