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

• Published in: 2015 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
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.10.2015
• Subjects: CS education; discussion forums; MOOC; Programming; Reliability engineering
• DOI: 10.1109/VLHCC.2015.7357204

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.