Pair Programming: Boosting Programming's "Cool Factor" for Young Learners

A study reveals pair programming significantly boosts positive attitudes towards coding, with specific insights into how task design and role preference vary across all-female and all-male pairs.

Table of Links

Abstract and I. Introduction

II. Background and Related Work

A. Learning to Program: SCRATCH and Pair Programming

B. Gender in Programming Education and Pair Programming

III. Course Design

A. Introducing Young Learners to Pair Programming

B. Implementation of Pair Programming

C. Course Schedule

IV. Method

A. Pre-Study and B. Data Collection

C. Dataset and D. Data Analysis

E. Threats to Validity

V. Results

A. RQ1: Attitude

B. RQ2: Behavior

C. RQ3: Code

VI. Conclusions and Future Work, Acknowledgments, and References

V. RESULTS

As part of our experiment procedure, we explicitly refrained from assigning the pairs in order to not bias the students and to provide a realistic classroom setting. Since the resulting ...