Local industry representatives consistently point to the lack of large-project and team-based experience as a weakness in newly hired computer science graduates. To better prepare students for professional employment, two undergraduate computer science teachers at the University of Southern California combined a first and second year course so that students could work on projects whose scope was larger than the ones they normally worked on Wilczynski and Crowley (2009). Because second year students had already completed the first year course, they were able to mentor the first year students. This case study of that experiment, referred to as the Joint Coding Project (JCP), spans a seven-week period of collaboration among the two classes that took place during the spring semester of 2010. The goal of this case study is two-fold: The first goal is to understand how these undergraduate students worked collaboratively from a pedagogical perspective. Though the software programs developed by the teams are larger and more complex than typical programs that are developed individually, it is the collaborative process of development that differs significantly. The second goal is to use the findings to determine how effective student knowledge and performance assessment tools can be developed to provide feedback to help instructors understand student strengths and need-to-improve areas. An Activity Theory framework is used to frame the analysis, to understand interactions between teams and tools, quantity and chronology of contributions, correlations between work and achievement. We found that increased collaboration and well-paced work patterns correlate with higher achievement.
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