How Students Manage Peer Feedback Through a Collaborative Activity in a CS1 Course

In order to boost students’ motivation in practicing their problem-solving skills and give them opportunities to get feedback, we broke our CS1 course routine with a disruptive cross-skilling activity. It relies on collaboration between teams of students where peer feedback (using rubric) stands as the cornerstone to design and build a solution responding to a given problem.
This paper aims at formally assessing the peer feedback process across three activity sessions. It also highlights the different success factors supporting peer feedback in that context through a cause and effect diagram. We show that peer feedback fosters primary problem-solving foundations. We also discuss its limitations, namely due to an insufficient granularity in the provided checklist as well as a lack of transversal skills from students, making them less comfortable with peer feedback. Although, by repeating the activity, students could manage it better and better and take more advantage of peer feedback.