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
B. Gender in Programming Education and Pair Programming
Girls and boys often behave differently in CS education and programming classes in particular: while girls follow teachers’ instructions better and are more quiet, boys are often more intrusive and active [2], [3], [27]–[29]. This is socio-culturally inherently learned, with the result that girls are more inclined to please teachers [17], [28].
Although females in particular benefit from collaboration [14], [30], [31], research has so far neglected the question of gender-related characteristics in different pair constellations—all-female, all-male, and mixed pairs—with young students. At team level, some studies with teenagers and bachelor students indicate no significant gender-dependent differences between pairs in code production [12], [31]–[33], while others highlight that all-male groups have higher quality output [34]–[36]. The social aspect of PP has been studied less in detail, especially with young learners—the results so far indicate that the group constellation may well have an influence on attitude [37], communication and behavior [11], [33], [35], [38]. Since girls often have a negative attitude due to the social image of programming [39], [40], the effects of team constellation merit further investigation.
The children themselves also prefer different constellations: While boys tend to like mixed groups, girls prefer group work with other girls [27]. Although there are few studies on this, one assumption behind this observation is that boys can assert leadership and girls simply follow [27], [37], [41].
There are three limitations of prior work which we aim to address with this paper: (1) there have been few studies with children at elementary school and early middle school [4], [33], (2) most prior studies were conducted outside a school context, and thus often few female pairs were studied since mostly boys are interested in extracurricular programming projects [33], [36], and (3) little attention has been paid so far to affective effects such as behavior or creativity of PP roles [4], [33], [42]. This gap is problematic since we require a better understanding in how girls in particular benefit from different PP pair constellations, such that they can experience as early as possible that they, too, can program [4], which in turn might get them interested in CS before socially learned gender stereotypes become more prevalent [8]. Therefore, we aim to address these challenges by determining genderdependent attitudes, behavior, and code of students aged 8 to 14 years old in a regular school environment.
