Abstract:

In this poster presentation, I mainly share my personal professional experience teaching an Internet Programming Course for the past five years in a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) located in California, USA. HSIs receive additional funding from the US government. In order to qualify as an HSI, an institution must have at least 25 percent of Hispanic students from the total enrollment of undergraduate full-time equivalent students. Most Hispanic students in higher education are first-generation college students, “are low-income, have less academic preparation than their peers, and are concentrated geographically in a small number of states and institutions of higher education throughout the U.S.”

Internet Programming is a required course for undergraduate students in the Software Engineering Concentration of the Computer Science program. Classes are face-to-face. There are two classes per week, each lasts two hours. To promote learning and the mastery of the learning objectives I have implemented Pair Programming and some features of Mastery-Based Learning (MBL).

Pair-Programming consists of having two students collaborating on a programming task, one student assumes the role of the "driver," responsible for writing the program, while the other student serves as the "navigator," offering guidance, encouragement, and real-time debugging support.

The collaborative nature of pair programming yields several advantages for students, including:
1) the opportunity for ongoing error detection and correction,
2) increased satisfaction with the course and learning experience through peer interaction,
3) development of teamwork and 4) enhanced readiness for industry practices.

One of the reasons college students decide to leave a Computer Science major is “the perception of asocial community with low levels of human interaction including student-faculty and peer-peer” (Biggers, Brauer, & Yilmaz, 2008, p. 406).

In my Internet Programming course, students are grouped randomly in teams of four. They remain in the same team for the entire semester. During the lab sessions, each student uses Pair-Programming to work with just one of their teammates. They switch teammates every week. I have also implemented some features from MBL. In its pure form, MBL is an instructional approach that emphasizes that students should be permitted to learn at their own pace and to decide when to take the assessment to demonstrate their achievement of proficiency.

Other MBL features include:
(1) administering brief formative assessments based on the unit’s learning goals to offer students feedback on their learning progress.
(2) Provide specific “corrective” activities, designed to guide students in correcting any identified learning difficulties, and
(3) take a second, parallel formative assessment.

As part of the presentation, I will include data comparing the average scores of the midterm exams conducted this semester to the results obtained last semester in which there was just one midterm exam in week 8. I will also share data regarding the number of students who benefited from the midterm exam date flexibility and the multiple attempts to retake the exam. By the end of the semester, In May, I will survey students to gather the students’ perceptions towards the implementation of Pair Programming and MBL and identify areas of improvement. Finally, the survey results will be shared as part of the presentation.

Keywords:

CS Undergraduate Education, Pair Programming, Undergraduate Education Strategies.