Remote Pair Programming in Online CS Education: Investigating through a Gender Lens

Online CS education shows many gender-inclusivity problems in practice and through tools, and little has been done to address this. In CS classrooms, pair programming has been shown to significantly help women and men understand and appreciate programming concepts, and to help close gender gaps. Unfortunately, pair programming is not well supported in online CS education, especially when one of the pair members is a woman. Our overall objective is to address this gap by investigating the following question: How can we bring the educational benefits of pair programming to online CS students in gender-equitable ways? In this paper, we empirically investigate whether and how technology-mediated remote pair programming hinders online students of same- and mixed-gender pairs. Based on our results, we propose refining personas and the cognitive walkthrough to include leadership styles and preferences for pair-programming roles. We further recommend features for online CS educational tools to promote gender-inclusiveness.