A Pair Programming Scheme for an Educational Programming Language

Abstract

Recently, coding education is increasing, based on an educational language that learners can not only learn easily but also improve computational thinking and creativity. However, there has been little research on how to teach coding because the coding education of using an educational programming language is just started. In particular, there has no cases of applying a pair programming scheme to an educational programmming education, which has been used in the existing programming education or software development process. Therefore, this study is exmining how to apply a pair programming scheme to coding education using an educational programming language. An educational programming language is simple, possible to write a code within short time, and easy to apply a pair programming scheme due to less tricky work for cooperation, compared with a general-purpose programming language. In this paper, we focus on reflecting the characteristics of an educational programming language and having the advantages of pair programming and seek to achieve the following three goals. First, we aim to develop a educational game that has funny and is able to code easily through pair programming and make learners learn the educational programming language during the development through the coding. Second, we aim to improve the learning achievement by learning coding skills from a peer learner sometimes through collaboration with the peer learner, by setting challeges sometimes through competition with a peer learner. Third, we aim to not only understand every instruction and to make possible to code with each instruction, but also let learners learn each instruction with a pair programming as soon as possible. Fourth, we aim to not only divide a coding task into even shares but also minimize the interactions between pair programmers.