Abstract:

Code review is an activity when a computer program is reviewed by colleagues of the program author. This technique is widely used in development of software projects because it demonstrably leads to a significant improvement in the quality of the program code. The code review can also serve as an activity suitable for educational purposes, where it can bring various benefits to students.

Trying to employ code review technique in high school teaching and to determine its impact on student learning, we have designed activities related to this technique and tested them under ordinary teaching conditions. Our research was carried out in two classes of the third grade in a high school, while the Algorithmic problem solving (i.e. programming) unit was taught in informatics classes.

Students have already programmed in the previous school year but they have not met with code review before. We included two types of code-review activities in the classes. In the first one (so called small reviews) students reviewed short programs prepared by the teacher.

The programs were only written on a paper, students were not executing them. Their task was either to find out what would the result of the program code be if it was executed or to identify bugs in the program code and correct them. Another type of code review activity was the project review where the students reviewed and commented on a larger programs created by their classmates with the aim to point out the errors, to advice how to fix them and what needs to be modified or added in the program code to make it more fitting to the specification of the project.

In this contribution we will focus on the latter activity. We will present preliminary results from our research showing that the code review can be perceived as an educational activity suitable in teaching at secondary school. Students learn to read, navigate, and understand someone else's code, not only their own. Their algorithmic thinking is also enriched by seeking alternative solutions or finding an alternative solution to the problem in the code of somebody else. Code review activity in high school teaching brings a lot of benefits to students, although they often see it as an extra work.

Keywords:

Programming, Code review, High School.