Toward a domain-specific visual discussion forum for learning computer programming: An empirical study of a popular MOOC forum

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 learn...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2015 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) pp. 101 - 109
Main Authors Zhu, Joyce, Warner, Jeremy, Gordon, Mitchell, White, Jeffery, Zanelatto, Renan, Guo, Philip J.
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.10.2015
Subjects
CS education
discussion forums
MOOC
Programming
Reliability engineering
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Summary: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.
DOI:10.1109/VLHCC.2015.7357204