title: "Perceptions of Non-CS Majors in Intro Programming: The Rise of the Conversational Programmer"
authors: Parmit K. Chilana, Celena Alcock, Shruti Dembla, Anson Ho, Ada Hurst, Brett Armstrong, Philip J. Guo
venue: IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)
year: 2015
links:
- <a href="conversational-programmer-papers.htm">Blog post</a>

tweet: College students learn some coding to understand technical jargon even if they don't want to code

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
  <i>conversational programmers</i> 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.

bibtex: >
  @inproceedings{ChilanaVLHCC2015,
    author={Chilana, Parmit K. and Alcock, Celena and Dembla, Shruti and Ho, Anson and Hurst, Ada and Armstrong, Brett and Guo, Philip J.},
    title={Perceptions of non-CS majors in intro programming: The rise of the conversational programmer},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)},
    series = {VL/HCC '15},
    year={2015},
    pages={251-259},
    doi={10.1109/VLHCC.2015.7357193},
    month={Oct}
  }