A Practice Enquiry Design to Investigate How Pair Programming Can Help with Constructing Automata

Abstract

Finite state automata (FSA) are a fundamental concept in the theory of computation and the undergraduate computer science education. However often students encounter difficulties with the task of constructing them due their abstract, theoretical nature. We present a disciplinary enquiry design investigating to what extent Pair Programming (PP) as a collaborative learning activity impacts on Software Engineering (SE) undergraduate students’ perceived and assessed performance when used for the task of constructing FSA.