CaptainTeach: a platform for in-flow peer review of programming assignments

Abstract

Peer review is effective for teaching students to evaluate approaches to problems, fostering collaboration, and assessing other students' work. Peer review often happens after assignments are turned in, on complete artifacts that other students have created. We've been experimenting with a different style of peer review, which we call in-flow reviewing, in which programming assignments are broken into reviewable stages. After students complete each stage they review one anothers' work, allowing for feedback early on in the assignment. We've built a system, dubbed Captain Teach, for exploring in-flow reviewing for both programming and written assignments. In our demonstration and tutorial, we will show what the student experience looks like for a Captain Teach assignment, explain the interface that instructors have for creating assignments in Captain Teach, outline some of the mechanisms for anonymously assigning reviews and distributing feedback, and discuss future directions for the tool.