Nice experience you had. I think the post focused exactly on the group experience, in writing code collaboratively and developing the sense of good and clear code by sharing the creation of it. This stepwise refinement seems a useful technique, but maybe vulnerable to siloing students. A balance of both could lead great results!

The short explanation is that you slowly develop your code top-down by creating the abstractions you need and mocking them in your tests suites. Implementation for each abstraction is then done later (i.e. by your future self).

Nice! Thanks for sharing. I might try yours too. I think yours would be a good follow up to mine, like an “advanced version” 🙂

Reminds me of another exercise which I do with students “communication through code”, basically the first step of the described one but with a different communication.

I give a task and a time limit and ask to write the code. It’s clearly not enough time to implement the algorithm completely (let’s say “find distance between triangles in 3D” in 15 minutes). But they should put enough information to understand how it will work. It’s OK to declare something and not implement. I ask to strive for compilable (but obviously not linkable) code.

Then every student gives his/her version to the next one. And that next student has to explain how the algorithm works and which corner cases are not covered.

And of course comments in code and verbal communication are not allowed. Only names of things in C++ (functions, types, variables).

After that we reflect on the experience of reading someone else code.