Abstract
Pair programming has been widely acclaimed the best way to go in computer programming. Recently, collaboration involving more subjects has been shown to produce better results in programming environments. However, the optimum group size needed for the collaboration has not been adequately addressed. This paper seeks to inculcate and acquaint the students involved in the study with the spirit of team work in software projects and to empirically determine the effective (optimum) team size that may be desirable in programming/learning real life environments. Two different experiments were organized and conducted. Parameters for determining the optimal team size were formulated. Volunteered participants of different genders were randomly grouped into five parallel teams of different sizes ranging from 1 to 5 in the first experiment. Each team size was replicated six times. The second experiment involved teams of same gender compositions (males or females) in different sizes. The times (efforts) for problem analysis and coding as well as compile-time errors (bugs) were recorded for each team size. The effectiveness was finally analyzed for the teams. The study shows that collaboration is highly beneficial to new learners of computer programming. They easily grasp the programming concepts when the learning is done in the company of others. The study also demonstrates that the optimum team size that may be adopted in a collaborative learning of computer programming is four.
Highlights
Computer Programming is known to be a complex task that is difficulty to do
We explore the effectiveness of the egoless collaborative team structure by organizing some experiments to determine the optimum team size needed in a typical programming environment
These Students were chosen as subjects for this project because it is appropriate to use students who are just learning how to program because the effect of collaboration can be noticed without wasting much resource
Summary
Computer Programming is known to be a complex task that is difficulty to do. The first and most challenging task encountered by computing students is how to understand computer programming. The difficulties faced by the students are attributed to the high degrees of failure and the difficulties presented in the courses directly dependent on the abilities to program, to develop a logical reasoning and to solve problems. Production of high-quality software has been assisted by pair or collaborative programming, which was formalized as one of the core practice in extreme programming (XP). The existing studies indicate some improved outcomes through collaborative programming, such as better quality software, faster production speed, fewer defects and greater enjoymet [2]
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