Spend a minimum of 40 minutes with your partner on the exercise below. You may spend more time, of course, if you’d like and your schedules allow. While you may use some of your partner’s starter code as you revise your own, this is not about collaborating per se. In pair programming terms, you may serve as ‘navigator’ for your partner as you discuss code, but each student should always be their own driver.

Pair up

Here are today’s randomly generated pairs:

jamesma560 : EternalFootman
RhymesWithMecca : payalpn
batlopez : namagic
ericabrody : nataliele
jwarrich : wookiemage
yiyangshi : izayak
hannahlwang : ShyArmadillo8
clairewlj : wfh1972
wagerpascal : gao14g
tsukori : camazotz
touchwick : JayYang95

You can use our classroom Gittr chat (click ‘chat’ in the menu bar of this site) to exchange info or drop a link to a video room. Note that this room is public. There may be a little chaos getting everyone into video chats but stick with it and perservere like I know you can :)

For video chats I recommend http://free.gotomeeting.com or Google hangouts. It’s very important for you to pick one of these and test it out on your laptop ahead of time to avoid technical difficulties. Video chats can be a pain but with a little preparation they don’t have to be.

Warm up: Gerund Challenge

Work in a pair programming style to solve this challenge:

Make sure to consult your partner before typing- and make sure you’re helping the driver! Then siwtch and solve the problem again but do it a different way.
What ‘different’ means is up to you. Don’t spend more than a few minutes on this total; it’s a warm up!

Milestones

Review and merge you partner’s pull request, discussing it with them like you would in person. Make liberal use of screen sharing so that you and your partner can look at the same thing.

Read & discuss each other’s milestones and how you’ve broken down the project. What can you learn from how your partner did this. Is there anything you’d like to change?

Starter code

Explain your starter code to each other and ask any questions you have about how and why your partner did what they did. Are there pieces of code they wrote that you like? With attribution, you can copy parts of their code as you re-write your own.

Why?

The purpose of this exercise is to help you think though your milestones and revise your starter code before getting going in earnest. Having to explain these things to someone else is a sure fire way to uncover any uncertainties you might run into.

There is nothing to turn in to me but if you’re having problems, feel free to email me and I’ll do my best to help, with the caveat that I’m traveling and will be slow to respond.