title: "Toward a Domain-Specific Visual Discussion Forum for Learning Computer Programming: An Empirical Study of a Popular MOOC Forum"
authors: Joyce Zhu, Jeremy Warner, Mitchell Gordon, Jeffery White, Renan Zanelatto, Philip J. Guo
venue: IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)
year: 2015
links:
- Blog post
tweet: Text-based discussion forums are inefficient for teaching programming; they need to be more visual
abstract: >
Online discussion forums are one of the most ubiquitous kinds of
resources for people who are learning computer programming. However,
their user interface -- a hierarchy of textual threads -- has not
changed much in the past four decades. We argue that generic forum
interfaces are cumbersome for learning programming and that
there is a need for a domain-specific visual discussion forum for
programming. We support this argument with an empirical study of all
5,377 forum threads in Introduction to Computer Science and Programming
Using Python, a popular edX MOOC. Specifically, we investigated how
forum participants were hampered by its text-based format. Most notably,
people often wanted to discuss questions about dynamic execution state
-- what happens "under the hood" as the computer runs code. We propose
that a better forum for learning programming should be visual and
domain-specific, integrating automatically-generated visualizations of
execution state and enabling inline annotations of source code and
output.
bibtex: >
@inproceedings{ZhuVLHCC2015csforums,
author={Zhu, Joyce and Warner, Jeremy and Gordon, Mitchell and White, Jeffery and Zanelatto, Renan and Guo, Philip J.},
title={Toward a Domain-Specific Visual Discussion Forum for Learning Computer Programming: An Empirical Study of a Popular MOOC Forum},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)},
series = {VL/HCC '15},
year={2015},
pages={101-109},
doi={10.1109/VLHCC.2015.7357193},
month={Oct}
}