Problems encountered by novice pair programmers

ABSTRACT

In a study of the types of problems encountered by students that lead them to seek assistance, Robins, Haden, and Garner [8] found that the most common problems were related to trivial mechanics. The students in this study worked by themselves on their programming exercises. This paper discusses a replication of the Robins et al. study in which the subjects pair programmed. The types of problems encountered by the pairing students were similar to those of the solo students. The number of problems requiring assistance was much smaller for the pairing students, which suggests that they were able to resolve more problems on their own.

REFERENCES

• 1: Sandy Garner , Patricia Haden , Anthony Robins, My program is correct but it doesn't run: a preliminary investigation of novice programmers' problems, Proceedings of the 7th Australasian conference on Computing education, p.173-180, January 01, 2005, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia
• 2: Brian Hanks , Charlie McDowell , David Draper , Milovan Krnjajic, Program quality with pair programming in CS1, Proceedings of the 9th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education, June 28-30, 2004, Leeds, United Kingdom
• 3: Raymond Lister , Elizabeth S. Adams , Sue Fitzgerald , William Fone , John Hamer , Morten Lindholm , Robert McCartney , Jan Erik Moström , Kate Sanders , Otto Seppälä , Beth Simon , Lynda Thomas, A multi-national study of reading and tracing skills in novice programmers, Working group reports from ITiCSE on Innovation and technology in computer science education, June 28-30, 2004, Leeds, United Kingdom
• 4: Raymond Lister , Anders Berglund , Tony Clear , Joe Bergin , Kathy Garvin-Doxas , Brian Hanks , Lew Hitchner , Andrew Luxton-Reilly , Kate Sanders , Carsten Schulte , Jacqueline L. Whalley, Research perspectives on the objects-early debate, Working group reports on ITiCSE on Innovation and technology in computer science education, June 26-28, 2006, Bologna, Italy
• 5: Michael McCracken , Vicki Almstrum , Danny Diaz , Mark Guzdial , Dianne Hagan , Yifat Ben-David Kolikant , Cary Laxer , Lynda Thomas , Ian Utting , Tadeusz Wilusz, A multi-national, multi-institutional study of assessment of programming skills of first-year CS students, Working group reports from ITiCSE on Innovation and technology in computer science education, December 01, 2001, Canterbury, UK [doi>10.1145/572133.572137]
• 6: Charlie McDowell , Linda Werner , Heather E. Bullock , Julian Fernald, Pair programming improves student retention, confidence, and program quality, Communications of the ACM, v.49 n.8, p.90-95, August 2006 [doi>10.1145/1145287.1145293]
• 7: Nachiappan Nagappan , Laurie Williams , Miriam Ferzli , Eric Wiebe , Kai Yang , Carol Miller , Suzanne Balik, Improving the CS1 experience with pair programming, Proceedings of the 34th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, February 19-23, 2003, Reno, Navada, USA
• 8: Anthony Robins , Patricia Haden , Sandy Garner, Problem distributions in a CS1 course, Proceedings of the 8th Austalian conference on Computing education, p.165-173, January 16-19, 2006, Hobart, Australia
• 9: E. Soloway , James C. Spohrer, Studying the Novice Programmer, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Mahwah, NJ, 1988

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.3 COMPUTERS AND EDUCATION
      K.3.2 Computer and Information Science Education
          Subjects: Computer science education

General Terms:
Experimentation, Measurement

Keywords:
CS1, computer science education, errors, novice, pair programming