Influence of periodic role switching intervals on pair programming effectiveness

Abstract

Pair programming has been widely used in programming experiment teaching in programming courses. One of the important factors affecting the successful completion of pair programming is the timing of periodic role switching. We organized an experiment in the course of Python Programming for 102 freshmen who did not major in computer science. By comparing the accuracy of code submitted by students in the online judge system, we evaluated the influence of pairing programming on students’ programming ability under three different periodic role switching intervals of 15 min, 20 min and 30 min, and collected students’ perception towards pairing programming under different modes. We also made a standard to judge the normalization of code, to study the influence of pair programming on the normalization of code written by students. The results show that when the periodic role switching interval is 30 min, pairing programming is helpful for students to solve difficult problems, and it has a positive impact on the solution of subsequent problems after experiencing the process of solving difficult problems. When the periodic role switching interval is 20 min, students have a positive attitude towards pair programming. Therefore, the best switching interval can be set between 20 min and 30 min. However, in terms of code normalization, there is no significant relationship between the standard degree of student code and the switching interval of pair programming. We gave some explanations for this in this paper.