Pair-Teamwork Effect on First Semester IT Students to Achieve Collaborative Learning Through Social Relations

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the impact of pair-programing and teamwork and whether they will have positive effects on IT students’ social skills. Our hypothesis is the usage of Pair Programming (or Pair Teamwork) and shuffling the groups within the first semester will create a better social relation inside the classroom and better collaborative environments. This can introduce a better class dynamic, where “knowledge skills” (Eng. professional knowledge) will be shared and a better social environment to be created, resulting in an increase in satisfaction and motivation among IT-students, where we had access to two classes (DMU – Eng. Computer Science AP course, MMD – Eng. Multimedia designer AP course). During our research, we designed a survey that was distributed four times, during the period of three months. The result is combined into an excel sheet and measured with the average. We get an overview of the general population's response. The research design was in two stages, where the first part was to measure their response to pair-programming (PP) teamwork, with shuffling, and the second part was to test the effect of converting to Mob Programming (MP) groups. The result of these four surveys indicated that during the PP, the motivation and knowledge sharing started to decrease with time, however, when changing to MP there was a renewed motivational effect which started to increase motivation for their study. However, this is mainly true for the class of DMU, the other class of MMD had a slower response to the change of going from PP to MP. During the research, we also see Tuckman’s model of stages of group development in action, which is more profound with the DMU class than with the MMD class.