(1785) DEVELOPING EGOLESS PROGRAMMING CULTURE: MAKING LEARNING ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE PROGRAMMING FUN

摘要

This work was aimed at stimulating the interests of junior undergraduate Computer Science studentsin the art of assembly language programming by having them navigate the design and coding processin pairs. Pair/egoless programming has been successfully practiced by the software engineeringindustry and it involves having two programmers collaborating by working side-by-side using onecomputer keyboard and contributing equally to the design, implementation and testing of the productat the same time. This concept though viewed as unorthodox by some was found to have thepotentials to stimulate student's interests in those programming languages they find hard to learn.Using questionnaires and controlled experiments with the second year undergraduate students ofComputer Science;;Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, we investigated the costs and benefits of PairProgramming to Learning assembly language programming. Our research revealed that studentsworking in pairs had a reduced development time of 45%, and having them develop codes in pairsenhanced computer supported collaborative learning and constructivism, improved design quality,reduced defects in the final codes, enhanced their technical skills and improved team communicationssignificantly.