Paper Info
Title
For me, programming is ...
Abstract
Fun, interesting, hard, rewarding, and challenging: these are the most frequent responses of 697 students from five institutions at the end of a first programming course. Student experience with introductory programming courses is of interest to the computing education community, especially due to continued decreases in enrollments in computing degree programs. In this study, we explore one direct approach to document students' initial attitudinal experiences with programming by asking them to complete an open-ended question at the end of a first programming course. Based on content-analysis of students' responses, we find that nearly 50% of responses were positive in nature, there is significant difference in the responses of majors and non-majors, and that response characteristics correlate to earned grade in the course. We present preliminary, but inconclusive evidence on the impact of context (e.g., gaming or media computation) in a first programming course. Finally, we propose a multiple-choice question based on the most common student responses for large-scale deployment in computing courses and identify key contextual information that will inform future analysis of that data.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1145/1584322.1584335
international computing education research workshop
Keywords
Field
DocType
multiple-choice question,continued decrease,novice,common student response,cs1,affective,introductory programming,degree program,student experience,direct approach,attitude,multi-institutional,programming course,open-ended question,computing education community,introductory programming course,content analysis,multiple choice question
Contextual information,Software deployment,Computer science,Pedagogy,Affect (psychology)
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.49
13
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Beth Simon11245127.72
Brian Hanks221023.57
Renée McCauley32910.93
Briana Morrison4607.25
Laurie Murphy526324.95
Carol Zander633031.18