Preamble for those interested in how I made it through 8 years of computing education research without knowing how to program:

When I started my research career in psychology, I knew nothing about computer science. I had chosen to do my PhD with Richard Catrambone, a world-class cognitive scientist doing cool work at the intersection of cognitive psychology and educational technology. In my first month, I agreed to be a research assistant on a project about applying educational psychology to computing education between Richard and Mark Guzdial, a renowned computing education researcher. To me at the time, Mark was just some professor, and computing *probably* had to do with computers. I still remember our first meeting when Mark asked me if I had any programming experience. I said I had worked a little bit with HTML (and not that it had to been to customize my MySpace page). He gently told me that didn’t really count for what we were doing, and I tried to figure out why but couldn’t. That’s how little I knew.

So how on Earth have I conducted computing education research from that day forward? Partly with fearlessness stemming from sheer ignorance, but mostly with tons of help from people with loads of experience and knowledge about computing and teaching computing. While at Georgia Tech, I worked with Mark, Briana Morrison, and Barbara Ericson, who each have more computing education knowledge than any one person has a right to. Working with them, the most valuable perspective I had was as a novice. I could empathize with learners because I knew just as little as they did. Continue reading →

Briana Morrison, Adrienne Decker, and I have a couple of conference papers coming out this summer based on our work funded by NSF IUSE (1712231 and 1927906) for developing and testing subgoal labeled worked examples throughout introductory programming courses. We’re finishing up the second of three years on the project, so now is a good time to provide an update on the project and summaries of the papers. 

Project Update

Our goal for this project was to identify subgoals for programming procedures taught in introductory programming courses, create subgoal labeled materials that are easily adopted by other instructors, and test the efficacy of those materials for learning. During the first year of the grant, we conducted the Task Analysis by Problem Solving protocol to identify the subgoals of intro programming procedures. I’ve been holding back from taking an intro programming course for years just so that I could be a novice for this activity. For the task analysis, Briana taught me the basics of a semester-worth of programming in Java in one week while I visited her in Omaha. If there is anyone who could teach a semester in one week, it’s Briana. After the task analysis, we used the subgoals to develop subgoal labeled worked examples and practice problems that started from the most basic problems and gradually increased in complexity.

Continue reading →