Intertwined: Enhancing K-12 Pair Programming Engagement Using Real-Time Collaboration with Twine

Abstract

Twine is an open-source tool for creating interactive, nonlinear stories. Minimal programming experience is required for users to create a Twine story, but advanced programmers can extend a Twine story with conditional logic, variables, CSS, and JavaScript. Its accessibility has led to it being used as an educational tool, but it does not offer a native way for multiple users to collaborate on the same story. Students working on a single story are limited to sharing a computer or sending a file back and forth with each other. Prior research on pair programming with younger K-5 students have suggested that single-computer pair programming, where one person is actively using the computer at a given time, may not be the most productive method of collaboration. We developed Intertwined, a modified Twine that enables real-time collaboration between multiple users on the same story. This experience report details the use of Intertwined in a two-day programming camp with kids aged 8-15, where participants collaborated on a Twine story using both a single-computer pair programming method and a multi-computer pair-programming method where each camper was given their own computer. Our observations and survey results found that campers largely favored multi-computer pair programming. Campers had increased efficiency and fewer instances of interpersonal conflict when working on their own computers. Effective collaborative work relies not only on the appropriate method of collaboration but the appropriate tool and activity for collaboration, and real-time collaborative work using interactive stories should be given consideration as an effective learning method.