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This work presents a new paradigm for collaborative project-based computer science education called Online Mob Programming (OMP). OMP is adapted from the industrial practice of Mob Programming, where groups of developers work on the same problem, at the same time, in the same place. OMP was designed and implemented as a technique where a group of 4-6 students collaborate online through a structured process for solving programming tasks. In OMP, students rotate through clearly defined roles to collectively contribute towards a solution to a programming challenge. These roles require students to brainstorm potential solutions, decide on a path forward, and implement the correct course of action respectively. OMP was investigated in the context of a 6-week free online course on Cloud Computing. During the course, students participated in four intelligent conversational agent-coordinated OMP sessions. By instrumenting the online development environment, all student code revisions and chat logs were collected in addition to qualitative data from questionnaires. Analyses show evidence of success in terms of students following the structure of OMP and further investigations into differences in mob behavior based on the size, and problem outcome provide pedagogically valuable insights and a path toward building OMP into the computer science education curriculum.
Sreecharan Sankaranarayanan (Fri,) studied this question.