Title
Perceptions of non-CS majors in intro programming: The rise of the conversational programmer
Abstract
Despite the enthusiasm and initiatives for making programming accessible to students outside Computer Science (CS), unfortunately, there are still many unanswered questions about how we should be teaching programming to engineers, scientists, artists or other non-CS majors. We present an in-depth case study of first-year management engineering students enrolled in a required introductory programming course at a large North American university. Based on an inductive analysis of one-on-one interviews, surveys, and weekly observations, we provide insights into students' motivations, career goals, perceptions of programming, and reactions to the Java and Processing languages. One of our key findings is that between the traditional classification of non-programmers vs. programmers, there exists a category of conversational programmers who do not necessarily want to be professional programmers or even end-user programmers, but want to learn programming so that they can speak in the “programmer's language” and improve their perceived job marketability in the software industry.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/VLHCC.2015.7357224
2015 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Computer science education,computational thinking,programming for non-CS majors
Programmer,Existential quantification,Enthusiasm,Computer science,Human–computer interaction,Software,Perception,Java,Programming language theory,Software development
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
7
0.47
14
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Parmit K. Chilana125120.61
Celena Alcock270.47
Shruti Dembla370.47
Anson Ho491.18
Ada Hurst570.47
Brett Armstrong670.47
Philip Guo7452.90