Teaching Students through Comparing Code in CS1
Abstract
Developers rarely face a single way to solve a problem. More often, they are presented with multiple implementations that come from libraries, repositories, online forums, and, increasingly, from code suggested by large language models. For students preparing to enter this landscape, it is not enough to write code that simply works; they must also learn how to compare and evaluate competing solutions. This skill, termed comparative comprehension in recent work (2022), captures the ability to reason about similarities, differences, and trade-offs among code alternatives.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Teaching and Learning Programming
Software Engineering Research
Problem and Project Based Learning
Publication details
- Journal / source
- ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE)
- Pages
- 1743–1743
- Publication date
- 13 February 2026
- Language
- EN