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Bringing "High-level" Down to Earth: Gaining Clarity in Conversational Programmer Learning Goals

Published: 22 February 2022 Publication History

Abstract

As the number of conversational programmers grows, computing educators are increasingly tasked with a paradox: to teach programming to people who want to communicate effectively about the internals of software, but not write code themselves. Designing instruction for conversational programmers is particularly challenging because their learning goals are not well understood, and few strategies exist for teaching to their needs. To address these gaps, we analyze the research on programming learning goals of conversational programmers from survey and interview studies of this population. We identify a major theme from these learners' goals: they often involve making connections between code's real-world purpose and various internal elements of software. To better understand the knowledge and skills conversational programmers require, we apply the Structure Behavior Function framework to compare their learning goals to those of aspiring professional developers. Finally, we argue that instructional strategies for conversational programmers require a focus on high-level program behavior that is not typically supported in introductory programming courses.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGCSE 2022: Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - Volume 1
    February 2022
    1049 pages
    ISBN:9781450390705
    DOI:10.1145/3478431
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 22 February 2022

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    1. conversational programmers
    2. instructional design
    3. learning goals

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    • (2024)Profiling Conversational Programmers at University: Insights into their Motivations and Goals from a Broad Sample of Non-MajorsProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3632620.3671123(293-311)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
    • (2024)Insights from Social Shaping Theory: The Appropriation of Large Language Models in an Undergraduate Programming CourseProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3632620.3671098(114-130)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
    • (2023)Towards Methods for Identifying High-Quality Domain-Specific Programming PlansProceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 210.1145/3568812.3603478(18-19)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2023
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