Please suggest how teachers should create pairs for online classrooms:
With middle school students experiencing and displaying melaise, I am not hearing from everyone.
Considering this and how much is dependent on shared work when coding should partners be assigned or should students choose amongst those who do participate in assignments. Also include best practices for sharing their attempts with each other
Hi @jhenry! First, welcome to the forum! The question you ask is a good one. I am currently using this curriculum with 7th graders and malaise is probably the best descriptor for what I’m seeing as well. My classes are taught asynchronously using videos. That being said, I chose to make the paired programming optional. I encouraged students to connect using Google Meet, but few took me up on the offer. If you are able to teach in real time with students, using something like Zoom where you could put students into groups to work, then you might go ahead an assign partners. Otherwise, I’m not sure that the pair programming translates well to fully online teaching. This is fully my opinion & I would love to hear from others about how they are tackling similar problems. Stay healthy!
Hello @jhenry @edavis. I’m currently in a CS Discoveries training and we’re thinking ahead to the fall and teaching the course remotely. My school went remote mid March in the middle of a team group project. Students had been working online in their Edmodo groups with a good amount of success. But once we went remote, the malaise (good description) set in. There’s so much value to the paired programming. I’m concerned that students will drop off. We were introduced to MIT Hangout. I haven’t explored too much yet but was told that we could monitor the break out groups as a whole and pop in to rooms. I’m thinking that just like optional office hours, I can offer optional pair programming this way. I think if we can get even 1/4 of our kids to try that out, they might talk it up and get more classmates to join. I really appreciate this post and answer. The pair programming is a big question mark for me.