I tried out the Pairing feature this week and the students worked well with it.
Although the ideal situation is for the students to be working on the same puzzle where they Pair - is it possible for a student to Pair with another student who is working a couple of puzzle ahead of him and then get credit for the puzzles he hasn’t completed by clicking on those incomplete puzzles?
The reason I ask is I had a student yesterday that ‘all of a sudden’ caught up with another student sitting next to him BUT I didn’t see much collaborative work going on until caught up. He is a smart student and was just wondering if he found a loophole.
That is a very good question, indeed. I imagine that it would be hard for the system to tell whether the puzzle was completed genuinely, or whether they went back a few lessons and started clicking “Run” on the partner’s completed puzzles to fill in their progress.
I would suppose that this would make an important teaching moment. Helping the students see the difference between communicating about their code to rewrite on a partner’s computer, versus just auto-filling the solutions.
That said, I don’t know what the log-out policy is, so if their accounts were still connected and the student who was ahead went home to show her parents, then it all could have been very unintentional.
We’ll take a deeper look. In the meantime, please let us know if you discover anything.
It’s definitely a system than can be exploited by students if expectations are not set around using it responsibly. I would make sure students understand when and why they should the feature. Keep in mind you can also disable it and track progress manually if it becomes too much.
One of my students decided a few ago that it would be interesting to see if code.org would let him add ALL of his classmates as his partners. It did. He did about 8 bubbles like that before I noticed, which definitely messed up my progress.
Thanks Kiki. Yes I only have him for one more class period before he rotates out but I will keep an eye on it. I wonder if it would be possible to accept or not accept a partnership.
Paul
PS - Also nice talking with you at the banquet Sunday night.
Mike – Thanks – I usually track manually on the chart. This one just popped up yesterday and made me start wondering what exactly he had done. He is smart enough to have figured it out - like your student.
