Improving undergraduate students programming skills through Collaborative Adversarial Pair Learning

Collaborative learning has been used extensively in undergraduate education to improve learning for all students. To improve performance in computer science courses, our study incorporated a new, although related, pedagogical approach entitled Collaborative-Adversarial Pair Learning (CAPL). The CAPL employs a software development technique called Collaborative-Adversarial Pairs (CAP) to teach computer science courses. We have demonstrated that CAP is effective in helping engineers discover software requirements. It seems a natural extension to use the techniques of CAP to help students discover concepts in computer science. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a CAPL model for a computer programming course (Software Engineering I), and then present the results of an evaluation of the model when compared to traditional instruction in Software Engineering I.