Hall of Shame & Fame: a pedagogical pattern for computer programming classes

Pedagogical patterns propose to take advantage of the expertise in teaching and learning practices, in an organized manner that can be easily reused by educators. In this paper, we propose a pedagogical pattern targeted to teaching programming in higher level courses in Computer Science. This pattern is centered on the presentation and discussion of good and bad examples of code produced by the students, forming what was named respectively “Hall of Fame” and “Hall of Shame”. Throughout the text, we present a characterization of HOFS pattern, relating it to other pedagogical patterns described in the literature. We also report its application in teaching object oriented programming in a higher education institution. The results indicate a positive evaluation by students and reveal the pattern helps to encourage good programming practices.