Abstract
Collaborative learning activities have become a common practice in current university studies due to the implantation of the EHEA. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a radical and abrupt change in the teaching–learning model used in most universities, and in the way students’ group work is carried out. Given this new situation, our interest is focused on discovering how computer science students have approached group programming tasks. For this purpose, we have designed a cross-sectional pilot study to explore, from both social and technological points of view, how students carried out their group programming activities during the shutdown of universities, how they are doing them now, when social distance must be maintained, and what they have missed in both situations. The results of the study indicate that during the imposed confinement, the students adopted a programming model based on work division or distributed peer programming, and very few made use of synchronous distributed collaboration tools. After the lockdown, the students mostly opted for a model based on collaborative programming and there was an increased use of synchronous distributed collaboration tools. The specific communication, synchronization, and coordination functionalities they considered most useful or necessary were also analyzed. Among the desirable features included in a software for synchronous distributed programming, the students considered that having an audio-channel can be very useful and, possibly, the most agile method to communicate. The video signal is not considered as very necessary, being in many cases rather a source of distraction, while textual communication through a chat, to which they are very accustomed, is also well valued. In addition, version control and the possibility of recovering previous states of the practical projects were highly appreciated by the students, and they considered it necessary to record the individual contributions of each member of the team to the result.
Highlights
The ability to work in a team is undeniably a basic skill for successful employment in STEM [1] and in particular in computer science (CS) [2]
The experience has revealed the need for group programming in a distributed way among CS students, especially in the first three years, no significant differences were detected in the students’ needs depending on the enrollment year or the size of their programming groups
Concerning the lessons learned from this study, we would like to highlight the good acceptance of collaborative programming tools by CS students
Summary
The ability to work in a team is undeniably a basic skill for successful employment in STEM [1] and in particular in computer science (CS) [2]. This is more evident in the field of software development, as it is considered to be a significantly creative and collaborative process [3], and it has been proved that programming in groups improves the process of solving software projects, the quality of the programs generated [4,5], and the programmers’ confidence [6]. The most frequent ways to approach such joint activities are the distribution of programming tasks in different parts of the program (different files, modules or functions) or the application of pair programming (PP) techniques [9], which constitutes a pedagogical strategy widely used in introductory programming courses [10]
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