A Comparative Study Of Pair Programming And Solo Programming In Junior High School Information Technology Courses

Programming is an important tool for developing computational thinking,and it is a great facilitator for developing students’ confidence in problem-solving,exercising their thinking to solve problems,and practicing to help internalize knowledge,helping students to better achieve individual knowledge and abilities at the primary and secondary school levels.There are problems with the solo programming format as the most common form of teaching in schools.Students may encounter many difficulties in thinking solo in the face of complex programming problems and need to explore effective teaching methods to facilitate students’ programming learning.The form of collaborative programming by programmers in Internet companies for teamwork in solving complex problems has been introduced into the educational field,requiring two programmers to work together on the same programming task,sharing a keyboard and computer.A large number of foreign scholars have used it in education and teaching as a teaching method to investigate its effectiveness.And since students have different levels of physical and mental development at different stages of development and cultural backgrounds,pair programming is one of the hot topics worth exploring in terms of its effectiveness in different countries and at different ages.The research on the effectiveness of pair programming is based on the premise that pair programming is effective,and that students’ physical and mental development varies across developmental stages and cultural backgrounds and values,so This study investigates the effects of pair programming compared to solo programming.This paper first uses the literature research method to review the literature,sort out the relevant research background to propose a solution to the problem,and then design solo programming teaching strategies and pair programming teaching strategies based on programming teaching design principles.This paper discusses the effectiveness of the different programming teaching modes and provides a reference for future effective programming teaching modes.Therefore,in this study,two sixth grade classes in a middle school in city H were selected to apply the designed solo programming instructional strategy and pair programming instructional strategy respectively.In this paper,the computational thinking scale and the programming self-efficacy scale were distributed before and after the teaching practice,and the data were collected and tested using SPSS software.The research indicated:1.pair programming and solo programming both significantly improved middle school students’ computational thinking,but there was no significant difference between the two methods;2.pair programming significantly improved middle school students’ self-efficacy compared to solo programming;3.pair programming was more conducive to the completion of difficult programming tasks compared to solo programming;4.pair programming was more helpful than solo programming in problem problem solving,efficiency improvement,and interpersonal relationships.