Abstract—Pair programming is by definition two-person
programming on the same computer. The technique has been
used in many higher education institutions and has been
reported in some scientific articles, usually for introductory to
programming courses.
The aim of this article is to make a situation report analyzing
the scientific production on pair programming for curricular
units of introduction to programming in higher education,
measuring the advantages and disadvantages of the strategy.
The sample was composed by 153 articles indexed in Elsevier’s
Scopus. The results obtained by bibliometric analysis showed
the publication rates, authors, in which journals they are
published, which are the organizations and countries that
publish the most, which are the most cited articles and what
their purpose. The benefits reported are generally better code,
improved programming and group skills, advantages for
women and reducing the work of instructors. The problems are
group compatibility: there are studies that randomly distribute
pairs, while other use personality tests or knowledge
self-assessment.
Index Terms—Pair programming, CS1, introduction to
programming, higher education.
Sónia Rolland Sobral is with the REMIT – Universidade Portucalense,
Porto, 4200 Portugal (e-mail: sonia@upt.pt).
Cite: Sónia Rolland Sobral, "Is Pair Programing in Higher Education a Good Strategy?," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 10, no. 12, pp. 911-916, 2020.
Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).