Code.org Teacher Community — Try Pair Programming—track the progress of...

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Try Pair Programming—track the progress of multiple students using one computer!

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Professional engineers often “pair program” together on projects. They teach one another as they work, and their project enjoys the benefit of their collaborative energy. When students partner up to complete computer science courses in the classroom they can learn from each other, too. And when schools don’t have enough computers for every student, pair programming can help limited hardware go further.

We’ve heard from a lot of you who have attempted pair programming in the classroom that it can be tricky. (If you haven’t tried it, check out this resource about the practices, philosophy, and benefits of pair programming!) While collaboration is great for learning, when students work together in Code Studio only one student’s progress is tracked with the green dots. This can make it difficult to assess how each student is progressing. We’ve been working on a new feature to solve this, and it’s now live! 

Students can now choose teammates from a list of other students in your section when pair programming in Code Studio. You, the teacher, can track both team progress and individual student progress. Here’s how: 

How to use the Pair Programming feature on Code Studio

Young kids with a picture or word login can now add their partner when they log in. Then the two can do puzzles together.

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Older students can choose to add a partner in the sign in drop down on the top right:

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We know partners change, so you can let students work with different groups (or by themselves) each day. We store the puzzle code they did together with the “driver” or logged in user’s account. Both students will see their progress bubbles marked as complete. Puzzles they completed together appear no different to them in the progress overview than puzzles they completed by themselves. (This reinforces that pair programming is real programming, no less important or valid than programming done by a single person).

We’ve also updated the teacher view to allow you additional visibility into the work your students are doing together. On the progress dashboard, you’ll be able to see the puzzles students worked on in groups marked with the pair icon:

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You can also dig into the specifics of any particular pair-programmed puzzle by clicking on it. You’ll see the name of the “driver,” and a list of all the “navigators” that helped him/her. Because the code is stored with the driver’s account, we’ve bolded the driver’s name in the list of students so that you can quickly see the code (and the navigators are displayed in gray). We’ve added the pair programming icon to this view as well so you can tell at a glance whether students worked together or alone.

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Hopefully this feature enables even more collaboration in classrooms! Thanks for your feedback in encouraging us to develop our support for pair programming. And if you’d like to learn more about pair programming, watch this video from two pair programming experts :) 


Alice Steinglass

VP Product and Marketing, Code.org

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