Mismatch of Expectations: How Modern Learning Resources Fail Conversational Programmers April Y. Wang1, Ryan Mitts1, Philip J. Guo2, and Parmit K. Chilana1 1Computing Science 2Design Lab Simon Fraser University UC San Diego Burnaby, BC Canada La Jolla, CA USA {ayw7, rmitts, pchilana}@sfu.ca
[email protected] ABSTRACT Conversational programmers represent a class of learners variety of learners, such as computer science (CS) students who are not required to write any code, yet try to learn pro- [17,28,53], end-user programmers [14,15,30,32] and profes- gramming to improve their participation in technical con- sional programmers [1,3,13]. A large focus of these projects versations. We carried out interviews with 23 conversation- has been on improving learners’ understanding of program- al programmers to better understand the challenges they ming syntax and logic and facilitating interaction with fea- face in technical conversations, what resources they choose ture-rich programming environments as these are known to to learn programming, how they perceive the learning pro- present key challenges for new learners. cess, and to what extent learning programming actually Unfortunately, most of what we know about the programming helps them. Among our key findings, we found that conver- learning process and the challenges that learners face is based sational programmers often did not know where to even on studies of students in the classroom [53] or professionals in begin the learning process and ended up using formal and industry [1]. Only recently have we started seeing studies into informal learning resources that focus largely on program- informal learning processes among non-traditional popula- ming syntax and logic.