“Alright, what do we need?”: A study of young coders' collaborative dialogue

Collaboration is a vital part of the discipline of computer science, yet very little is known about how young children collaborate to learn programming in the classroom. Consequently, we have much to understand about how we can most effectively support this learning experience. We have conducted a study of fifth grade students (ages 9-11) in the United States. Students in this study enrolled in an elective computer science course in which they completed a pair programming project spanning one week of class time (45 min per day). This article reports on a deep qualitative analysis of six collaborative student pairs. We examine the ways in which pair programming practices emerge organically within elementary school collaborations, including the ways in which students' roles arise, equity of contributions to the dialogue, and how students manage their responsibilities during the collaborative process. Our results show that for some student pairs, making suggestions in the dialogue is a natural mechanism for swapping control, whereas for other students, the transition from “driver” to “navigator” requires substantial scaffolding. The findings provide insights into the ways in which we can scaffold the collaborative process to support young students' computer science learning.