Utilizing Pair Programming Techniques in a Web Development Course

Lecture recordings are a common and useful resource for students due to the flexibility they provide. Recent rapid shifts to online modes of teaching have made recorded lectures especially valuable as many students rely on them to access course content. As a result, there is a pressing need to understand how students consume lecture content via recordings and what patterns of access are effective. In this research, we investigate the common lecture recording viewing behaviors of students and the relationship between lecture recording viewing and academic performance in a first-year programming course. Several trends were observed. A significant positive correlation between lecture recording views and final grades was identified. Students who repeated the course after failing it once, achieved, on average, higher grades if they had more lecture recording views in their second attempt. A small number of students engaged in habitual “binge-watching” behavior and those students had lower grades, on average, than students who watched more regularly. This was a particular problem for repeating students, attempting the course a second time, who failed the course at twice the rate if they engaged in habitual binge-watching. Although lecture recordings appear to be a helpful learning resource for students in introductory programming courses, this work suggests that binge-watching is an unproductive study strategy that should be discouraged.

Studies indicate that information systems and computer science programs should place more emphasis on software design topics.Because little significant software in a commercial environment is developed using only programming skills,students without exposure to design patterns and frameworks will be ill-prepared for the workforce. This paper investigates whether PHP-based web development courses should use PHP frameworks to guide program development and how to select an appropriate framework. The paper begins with a literature review of the concept of design patterns, particularly the Model-View-Controller(MVC) pattern. We review studies that argue that design patterns and frameworks are essential pedagogical tools. Finally, we report on our work to select an appropriate framework for incorporation into web development courses as well as the process by which some of the major PHP MVC frameworks were assessed to determine which is best-suited for use in an academic environment.

This paper investigates a class of database access errors that occur in the context of a web development course. While the use of an Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) simplifies database access, students still demonstrate reference errors such as mistakenly referring to the whole object rather than an attribute value that is a part of the object. Metonymy, a rhetorical device used in human communication, offers an interpretation to these errors. A study is presented where student answers are reported and analyzed in this context. Findings indicate the prevalence of reference errors and offer instructional strategies for addressing them.

This Systematic Literature Review (SLR) investigates the role of pair programming in higher education, focusing on its impact on students' learning outcomes, collaboration, and programming skill development. As programming courses become increasingly complex, the demand for effective teaching methods has led to the growing popularity of collaborative learning techniques, such as pair programming. However, questions remain regarding its scalability, adaptability, and long-term benefits in educational settings. A thorough search of academic publications from 2021 to 2024 was conducted to explore these issues using databases such as Scopus and Web of Science (WoS). The study followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framework, starting with 42 articles, of which 22 met the inclusion criteria for further analysis. Articles were excluded for irrelevance, mismatched titles, lack of empirical data, or unavailability of full texts. The review categorized its findings into three key themes: (1) Remote and distributed Pair Programming (RPP), (2) psychological and social dynamics, and (3) pedagogical approaches and tools. The results suggest pair programming enhances students' learning performance, particularly in introductory programming courses, by improving problem-solving skills and coding proficiency. However, challenges such as unequal participation and student resistance persist. The success of pair programming largely depends on proper implementation and teacher facilitation. While the review indicates that pair programming holds promise as an instructional strategy in higher education, it emphasizes the need for further research to assess its long-term impact and address its implementation challenges.

Opportunities for students at all age levels to learn programming are growing and this has led to increased enrolments both online and in the classroom. As the range of prior experiences within a cohort becomes more diverse, it poses a challenge for instructors to produce learning resources at an appropriate level of difficulty for individuals. Techniques to easily modify the difficulty of existing resources can be valuable in addressing this challenge, but not all problem types lend themselves to such customization. Parsons problems are a popular programming exercise that present learners with the lines of code for a solution in a scrambled order. Faded Parsons problems are a recent variation, where some lines of code have missing portions that students are required to fill in. Selecting which parts of the solution code to remove, or fade, is typically a manual process for an instructor and little is known about how different fading strategies impact problem difficulty. In this paper, we present a novel open-source tool for delivering Faded Parsons problems, and we explore the relative difficulty of three distinct fading strategies as part of an evaluation in a first-year programming course with 900 students. We find that fading conditional statements greatly increases the difficulty of Faded Parsons problems, and we observe that some students appreciate the ability to tackle more challenging problems. Results of this work will inform future automated approaches for adapting the difficulty of such problems.

Teaching students project managements requires a hands-on approach. Incorporating project management concepts and processes into a student team Web development project adds a dimension that exposes students to the realities of effective Web development. This paper will describe the project management approach used in a Web development course in which students build complete Websites. Based upon the written evaluations included with the final project documentation, students feel this project is the most valuable learning experience of the course. Furthermore, a positive relationship is established between the actual Web development and effective project management processes. It is important for students to understand the triple constraints (scope, time, and cost) that must be balanced in business projects.

This paper presents the partial results of an extended replicated pair programming experiment, conducted at the Alexander Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki, Greece during the two semesters of the year 2009-10. The entire study involved 160 second semester students attending a Software Engineering advanced programming course with pair programming and test-driven development as teaching methodology. A series of formal experiments were conducted to investigate, as in the first experiment, the impact of developer personalities and temperaments on pair performance. In this paper we report partial results and we focus on pair performance in terms of communication, time to complete assignments and overall score. The main variables were statistically analyzed in order to test differences between two personality groups: A control group with homogeneous personalities in pairs and an experimental one with heterogeneous personalities. The findings reported here concern only the first winter semester and confirm that pairs consisting of heterogeneous personalities and temperaments performed better than pairs with the same personality and temperament type. However, time to complete assignments was not statistically different between the two groups.

The teaching and learning of programming are often considered a difficult topic for both teachers and students, due to its complexity and abstract nature. The traditional teaching approaches are unable to contribute substantially to the development of the necessary cognitive models by the students, producing high rates of failure and dropout in introductory programming courses. In the last 30 years, the scientific community has not stopped looking for new pedagogical approaches and teaching techniques in introductory computer programming courses. Various studies have shown that pair programming under appropriate conditions may create an environment conducive to learning, leading to an increase student interest in programming. In this paper, the author presents the results of a pilot teaching intervention. The sample was collected among first-grade students of a high school in Greece. The results showed that the pair programming is more efficient than the solo programming, both on facilitating and supporting students' learning and understanding of basic programming concepts, as well as on improving students' attitudes toward programming.

Can Web development courses avoid obsolescence?

Mobile web development is one of the fast growing fields in IT. New and powerful front-end development technologies and tools are available to help users with limited experience build mobile-friend...

California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB) uses an outcomes-based delivery philosophy and focuses on measurable student learning. Because of the required outcome it was determined that the students needed more scaffolding or metacognitive support than is typically afforded in the introductory programming courses. The students were simply not capable of making the jump from simple programming concepts to being able to deliver a satisfactory completed portfolio piece. This paper reports on a study that investigated use of pair programming as a delivery methodology for an introductory Java programming course

Asking questions in class in front of peers can be intimidating for many students. However, receiving timely answers to questions can help students better understand subsequent material. Moreover, prior work has shown that students learn more effectively in interactive classroom environments that promote instructional practices such as question posing. This paper describes a web-based platform, HandsUp, that addresses the underlying factors preventing students from asking questions in lectures. Using this tool, students can ask questions of their instructor while remaining anonymous to their peers, and instructors can choose to answer the questions that are of interest to the most students. We find that students can interact with the tool easily, and we present a short case study of its use in a large first-year programming course.

These days, the conventional ways of teaching programming are not attractive to students. For instance, classical lecture and tutorial classes are not sufficient and provides only one-way learning environment. Most of the students nowadays prefer to have more engaging, fun, competitive, collaborative, and instant feedback learning environment. These elements can be achieved using gamification to increase students’ interest in computer programming courses. More specifically, we used three gamification techniques in one advanced programming course: pair-programming teaching technique to maintain collaboration between students, Kahoot! system to provide an interactive quizzes system and instance feedback, and finally we used Robocode platform to teach Object-Oriented programming concepts in a fun and competitive fashion. We believe that gamifying teaching and learning process has great potential to assist teachers and engage students in a new and challenging way. This paper presents an empirical study that was carried out in one advanced computer-programming course were the mentioned gamification techniques were applied. A subjective system evaluation revealed that the students appreciated the used techniques. The results also revealed that the students’ interest in computer programming were enhanced as well.

In pair-programming, two developers share a computer to work together on developing one piece of code. To test Pair-programming effects on students' behavior in a Middle Eastern society where some interaction restrictions are found, we devised an empirical study that was carried out over an entire academic year consists of two semesters. The study targeted two sections per semester of an advanced computer programming course. The students of one of the sections worked in pairs during the lab sessions, applying pair-programming rules and techniques. The other section had students who worked individually, as it is the norm in most programming labs. Video recordings were recorded throughout the lab sessions, and then studied and analyzed. The preliminary results revealed that pair-programming has the potential to increase the students' confidence, their enjoyment of the course, and improved the course's completion rate.

Programming anxiety is a well-documented challenge in introductory computing courses, particularly among students with no prior exposure to programming. Scaffolding strategies such as pair programming, Parsons puzzles, and starter code templates are widely used to reduce anxiety and build confidence during the early stages of learning. Although starter templates often include explanatory comments and partially completed code, the relative effectiveness of these different scaffold types in mitigating anxiety has not been systematically examined. This article reports findings from a controlled experiment conducted during the first laboratory session of an undergraduate C programming course for students from different engineering and science disciplines. Pairs of students were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: a control group using blank templates, a comments-based scaffold group, and a code-based scaffold group. Coding anxiety was measured using a questionnaire with subscales related to self-efficacy, partner interaction, and peer judgement. Contrary to our expectations, the control group showed a greater reduction in coding anxiety than either scaffolded group, and students in the comments-based condition reported larger decreases in anxiety than those receiving code-based scaffolds. These findings suggest that for beginners, even well-intentioned scaffolds can temporarily increase the perceived difficulty in task completion.