The George Washington University
School of Engineering and Applied Science
Department of Computer Science

CSci 131 -- Algorithms and Data Structures I
Fall 2000

A Guide to Paired Development

Several other universities have reported success in courses like this with "paired development", in which students are allowed to develop projects in 2-person groups instead of only individually. There are several advantages to this:

  • Students learn to work in teams, which is very important in industry.
  • The product of a team may be better than the products of any of the individuals.
  • Each student has another student to turn to "legally" for help, making it unnecessary to get "illegal" help.
There are also some obvious disadvantages:
  • Depending on how the team members divide the work, it is possible that some members will learn more of the material than others.
  • There is some risk that one member will do very little work on the project, forcing the other member to do more than his or her share.
We think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, so for Project 2, and (probably) the remaining projects in this course, we are going to use a "paired development" setup. This will allow students to form 2-person "teams" to do the project together. Here are the rules we will follow.
  1. We strongly suggest that you work in pairs, but if you prefer to work "solo", we will allow you to do so.
  2. If you are pairing up, you must pair up with another student in your lab section.
  3. You must work with a different teammate on each team project; you cannot work together with the same person on two different projects.
  4. For Project 2, by the end of your lab on Sept. 12 or Sept. 14, each student must report, by e-mail, to both Prof. Feldman and the lab instructor, whom they are working with, or that they are working solo.
  5. You must try to divide the work equally, so both members of the pair get experience with all the algorithm, programming, and documentation requirements of the project.
  6. Each team will turn in one project submission.
  7. Each part of the submission must show the name(s) of the student(s) who worked on that part.
  8. Both team members will get the same grade for the project.
  9. Each team must do its own work; students may discuss the project with Prof. Feldman or their lab instructor, but may not discuss the project with anyone else.
  10. When you submit your project, each student will send a separate, confidential, e-mail note, to Prof. Feldman only, describing the contributions of both team members to the project. What percentage of the effort did each student contribute to each aspect of the project?
  11. If the two confidential evaluations are significantly different, Prof. Feldman may interview the team members individually. This will help prevent "uneven" teams and will serve to give you a recourse if you happen to be in one.

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