One computer per delegate, or pair programming?
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2007-09-23 19:29:23 - Graham EllisWe provide one laptop computer per delegate during our courses, and we're proud to do so - such a scheme works well for the majority of most of our programming courses, with each individual from his / her own company having practical coding exprience during the course.
However - for certain exercises on certain courses, there's a lot to be gained from using the alternative approach of working in pairs - putting your heads together to explore options and consider the best solution to a practical. And in the right circumstances, I encourage such pair working.
Pictures from last week's PHP course. At this stage of the course, we were studying how the main application, the business logic, the web helper codes and the look and feel of the application can (and should) be divided up into separate areas of code, so that each can be developed and maintained by a team member who enjoys working in that particular part of the application, and is an expert on it. The graphic artist majors on the graphic art, and the rock climber on the business logic that deals with rock climbing calculations.