Guidelines for the use of pair programming in a freshman programming class

Undergraduate freshman programming classes are conventionally organized such that individual students complete a set of concept-specific and unrelated programming assignments. This structure does not prepare students for future collaborative efforts or for the future use of software engineering practices. The addition of pair programming into a freshman programming class at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) showed similar benefits to similar studies on upper-division software classes, and is expected to show an improvement in students' willingness and ability to participate in complex, collaborative software engineering assignments in later classes. This paper describes the implementation of the pair programming experiment at UCSC, discusses some of the issues that compromised the effectiveness of certain pairs, and provides implementation guidelines for avoiding such issues in other classes.