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7 Conclusion and Future Work, Acknowledgments, and References
3 COURSE DESCRIPTION
Data Structures is a 400-level course offered in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at a large, public university. The course textbook was Data Structures and Algorithms in C++ (2nd Edition) by Goodrich, Tamassia, and Mount. Course materials were taught primarily through live coding, lectures, and small group discussion. Students received 150 minutes of instruction per week, with access to the professor, teaching assistants, and peer leaders [7] outside of contact hours. Data Structures was offered in person, with code and lecture recordings available for those who were unable to attend due to quarantine or other health-related reasons.
During the 2021 fall semester two identical sections of Data Structures were taught by the first author, one of which utilized pair programming (section 1) and a control group which did not (section 2). The pair programming section had 62 students (20 of whom were women) who were randomly assigned the same pair for all four graded assignments. The second section had 45 students (4 of whom were women) who completed each assignment individually.
During the second week of the semester, before any programming projects were assigned, the instructor taught object-oriented design concepts through a week-long live coding project. In this way, a form of pair programming was demonstrated to students, with the instructor as the driver and the class collectively as the navigator. In pair programming, the driver types the code while the navigator develops or modifies the flow of logic, suggests corrective, perfective, or refactorative maintenance, and encourages. Both the driver and the navigator participate real-time by watching the same screen, in person or remotely via screen sharing. Prior to beginning the first assignment, students in section 1 were instructed to read a document on pair programming best practices [18].
Authors:
(1) Zachariah Beasley, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA ([email protected]);
(2) Ayesha Johnson, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA ([email protected]).
This paper is
