Abstract:

This work was aimed at stimulating the interests of junior undergraduate Computer Science students in the art of assembly language programming by having them navigate the design and coding process in pairs. Pair/egoless programming has been successfully practiced by the software engineering industry and it involves having two programmers collaborating by working side-by-side using one computer keyboard and contributing equally to the design, implementation and testing of the product at the same time. This concept though viewed as unorthodox by some was found to have the potentials to stimulate student’s interests in those programming languages they find hard to learn. Using questionnaires and controlled experiments with the second year undergraduate students of Computer Science; Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Nigeria, we investigated the costs and benefits of Pair Programming to Learning Assembly Language programming. Our research revealed that students working in pairs had a reduced development time of 45%, and having them develop codes in pairs enhanced computer supported collaborative learning and constructivism, improved design quality, reduced defects in the final codes, enhanced their technical skills and improved team communications significantly.

Keywords:

Pair programming, computer supported collaborative learning, code testing, learning efficiency.