Code Reviews in Large, First-Year Courses

Computing educators have used code review to provide opportunities for students to engage with code artifacts and to learn about aspects of programming, such as design and style, that are difficult to appreciate when working individually. However, most implementations of code review have been implemented in relatively small courses. For the past two years, we have asked students in our 500-950 person first year courses to engage in code reviews of submissions to course assignments. This short paper describes our approach for implementing code reviews that scale to large first-year courses and describes a few lessons we have learned from deploying these learning opportunities in our courses.