Worked-out examples serve an important role in the educational process. In order to take advantage of such carefully designed examples, students have to "make sense" of the examples and retrieve them whenever it is appropriate. This calls for a knowledge management process to be conducted by the students; a process we implemented as a learning task during a Knowledge-Based Systems course. Students were required to incrementally define and refine a metadata scheme for representing and managing a growing set of programming examples that were introduced during the course. Our findings show that students' iterative processes of metadata creation and modification, which were conducted both individually and collaboratively, supported reflection activities and brought students to revisit, rethink and reinterpret the various code examples and the relations between them. We discuss the finding and the implications of having students deal with issues of reusability, abstraction, metadata; and with the respective tradeoffs and dilemmas.