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:
- <a href="programming-forums-paper.htm">Blog post</a>

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 <i>Introduction to Computer Science and Programming
  Using Python</i>, 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}
  }