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
VI. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
Pair programming is not only useful in practice but also in programming education. One of the concerns in programming education is how to better engage young female learners. It is therefore important to understand whether gender-specific differences can be observed with young learners performing pair programming. In order to investigate this question, we designed an in-class introductory programming course for young programming learners based on SCRATCH, in which pair programming is integrated, and studied it on 139 students aged between 8 and 14 years.
While the attitude towards programming and the course design is overall positive, the perception of fun and difficulty of programming tasks differ between all-female and all-male pairs. Both constellations prefer the role of the driver, although all-male pairs do not adhere to their roles as well as girls. In addition, we observed that all-male pairs are more adventurous in exploring the possibilities of SCRATCH and experimenting, while pairs of girls stick to the instructions. This suggests socially learned behavior which is transmitted to programming within same-sex pairs. However, unlike prior studies on gender differences for individual young programmers, we observe only minor differences in code quality and complexity of the final programs among the pairs, indicating that PP narrows this gap. When given creative freedom to the pairs, however, even pairs fall back to gender stereotypical preferences.
An individual study like ours can only provide initial insights, but raises several avenues for future research:
• We deliberately used a gender-neutral design, which raises the question how results would differ when using common stereotypical designs.
• Our study consists of a relatively short programming session, which raises the question how results would differ if PP were applied throughout a longer period.
• While our course design provides an easily reproducible PP scenario, deploying PP in the classroom will require research on dedicated teacher training.
• Since it may be the case that gender-dependent differences become more pronounced with age, it would be interesting to replicate our study with higher grades.
• Since online teaching has taken a more prominent role in education since Covid, it would similarly be interesting to investigate gender-specific effects in an online setting.
To support this future research we provide all course materials and evaluations for replication online.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research through project “primary::programming” (01JA2021) as part of the “Qualitatsoffensive Lehrerbildung”, ¨ a joint initiative of the Federal Government and the Lander. ¨ The authors are responsible for the content of this publication.
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