Icebreaker Software Engineering Exercise(s)

Overview

Topic: This is a module/assignment exploring the traits of human-readable code, something that is necessary in collaborative projects.

Time commitment: This module is designed to occupy a single class meeting.

Prerequisite knowledge: This module assumes introductory-level knowledge of programming, but no specific programming language.

Course context: This module is designed for use in any introductory programming or data science course.

This module is designed to help students meet the following learning objectives:

Prepare recipe cards with mini programming assignments on them, at least one for each student. See below for ideas.

Distribute one recipe card to each student. Provide blank paper if necessary.
Instruct students to write (on paper, in language/pseudocode of choice) a function for the task they have been given. Do not tell them what will be done with it.
Take in written functions, shuffle, redistribute. Give them a few minutes to read over the code
Students are to answer questions: ** What does the function you received do? ** Can you tell why it does it that way? ** Could it be clearer? ** Enough comments/too many? ** Easy/hard to read? ** Sensable variable/function names?
Add docstring-esque comments to the function and (if necessary) change the function name.

Have students extend each other’s code for a second task
Have students write test cases for the task before/after
Have them actually write the code for functions that are meant to work together
Repeat as a pair-programming exercise (with more advanced functions). Do the swap, see if pair-programming inherently improves readability

Advanced version of the exercise: give a dummy function name so that the code itself (and/or comments) must be self-explanatory.
Could save these papers for future exercises.