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Introducing Code Quality in the CS1 Classroom

Published: 08 July 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Characterising code quality is a challenge that was addressed by Börstler et al. 's working group in 2017. As emerged from their study, educators, developers and students have different perceptions of the manifold aspects involved, and a major conclusion of that WG was that "code quality should be discussed more thoroughly in educational programs" [2, p. 70]. However, the lack of materials and the time constraints have slowed down progress in that regard.
The goal of this working group is to propose manageable ways to address code quality in the CS1 classroom, with a particular focus on activities that help students become aware of and improve the quality of their code. To achieve this goal, we will (a) extract from the literature a comprehensive set of quality issues which will then be classified according to the appropriate strategies to fix them; and (b) circulate a survey to explore the instructors' views on code quality issues and the way they deal with (or ignore) them. Based on this work we aim to produce: (1) a taxonomy of code quality issues with associated examples, as well as (2) a sample set of teaching materials to introduce those issues to CS1 students.

References

[1]
Anastasiia Birillo, Ilya Vlasov, Artyom Burylov, Vitalii Selishchev, Artyom Goncharov, Elena Tikhomirova, Nikolay Vyahhi, and Timofey Bryksin. 2022. Hyperstyle: A Tool for Assessing the Code Quality of Solutions to Programming Assignments. In Proc. of the 53rd ACM Tech. Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE 2022). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 307--313.
[2]
Jürgen Börstler, Harald Störrle, Daniel Toll, Jelle van Assema, Rodrigo Duran, Sara Hooshangi, Johan Jeuring, Hieke Keuning, Carsten Kleiner, and Bonnie MacKellar. 2018. "I Know It When I See It" Perceptions of Code Quality: ITiCSE '17 Working Group Report. In Proc. of the 2017 ITiCSE Conference on Working Group Reports (ITiCSE-WGR '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 70--85.
[3]
Tomás Effenberger and Radek Pelánek. 2022. Code Quality Defects across Introductory Programming Topics. In Proc. of the 53rd ACM Tech. Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE 2022). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 941--947.
[4]
Iris Gaber and Amir Kirsh. 2018. The Effect of Reporting Known Issues on Students' Work. In Proc. of the 49th ACM Tech. Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 74--79.
[5]
Cruz Izu, Paul Denny, and Sayoni Roy. 2022. A Resource to Support Novices Refactoring Conditional Statements. In Proc. of the 27th ACM Conf. on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE '22). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 344--350.
[6]
Remin Kasahara, Kazunori Sakamoto, Hironori Washizaki, and Yoshiaki Fukazawa. 2019. Applying Gamification to Motivate Students to Write High-Quality Code in Programming Assignments. In Proc. of the 2019 ACM Conf. on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 92--98.
[7]
Hieke Keuning, Johan Jeuring, and Bastiaan Heeren. 2023. A Systematic Mapping Study of Code Quality in Education. In Proc. of the 2023 Conf. on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE 2023). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5--11.
[8]
Diana Kirk, Tyne Crow, Andrew Luxton-Reilly, and Ewan Tempero. 2022. Teaching Code Quality in High School Programming Courses - Understanding Teachers' Needs. In Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE '22). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 36--45.
[9]
Eliane S Wiese, Anna N Rafferty, and Armando Fox. 2019. Linking code readability, structure, and comprehension among novices: it's complicated. In 2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSE-SEET). IEEE, 84--94.

Cited By

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  • (2024)Teaching Code Quality In Embedded Systems (Doctoral Consortium)Proceedings of the 24th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research10.1145/3699538.3699579(1-2)Online publication date: 12-Nov-2024

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  1. Introducing Code Quality in the CS1 Classroom

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ITiCSE 2024: Proceedings of the 2024 on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 2
    July 2024
    125 pages
    ISBN:9798400706035
    DOI:10.1145/3649405
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Published: 08 July 2024

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    Author Tags

    1. CS1
    2. code quality
    3. readability
    4. refactoring
    5. style

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    • (2024)Teaching Code Quality In Embedded Systems (Doctoral Consortium)Proceedings of the 24th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research10.1145/3699538.3699579(1-2)Online publication date: 12-Nov-2024

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