Learning on the job: characterizing the programming knowledge and learning strategies of web designers

Authors:
Brian Dorn;Mark Guzdial
Affiliations:
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Year:
2010

Citing 20
Cited 9

Organization and learnability in computer languages

International Journal of Man-Machine Studies - Lecture notes in computer science Vol. 174
Learner-centered design: the challenge for HCI in the 21st century

interactions
Apprenticeship-based learning environments: a principled approach to providing software-realized scaffolding through hypermedia

Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education
Training agents to recognize text by example

Your wish is my command
Studying the language and structure in non-programmers' solutions to programming problems

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Harnessing curiosity to increase correctness in end-user programming

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
First Steps in Programming: A Rationale for Attention Investment Models

HCC '02 Proceedings of the IEEE 2002 Symposia on Human Centric Computing Languages and Environments (HCC'02)
Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science

Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science
Six Learning Barriers in End-User Programming Systems

VLHCC '04 Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages - Human Centric Computing
What novice programmers don't know

Proceedings of the first international workshop on Computing education research
Who, What, and How: A Survey of Informal and Professional Web Developers

VLHCC '05 Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing
Estimating the Numbers of End Users and End User Programmers

VLHCC '05 Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing
Computational thinking

Communications of the ACM - Self managed systems
Tinkering and gender in end-user programmers' debugging

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Translating keyword commands into executable code

UIST '06 Proceedings of the 19th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
Big Java

Big Java
Introductory Computing Construct Use in an End-User Programming Community

VLHCC '07 Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing
AutoCardSorter: designing the information architecture of a web site using latent semantic analysis

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
CoScripter: automating & sharing how-to knowledge in the enterprise

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Two studies of opportunistic programming: interleaving web foraging, learning, and writing code

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Discovering computing: perspectives of web designers

Proceedings of the Sixth international workshop on Computing education research
Non-programmers identifying functionality in unfamiliar code: strategies and barriers

Journal of Visual Languages and Computing
Social software and interactions in web design: an in situ exploration of tools & methods to support designer-client communication

Proceedings of the 22nd Conference of the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group of Australia on Computer-Human Interaction
ScriptABLE: supporting informal learning with cases

Proceedings of the seventh international workshop on Computing education research
Learning web development: challenges at an earlier stage of computing education

Proceedings of the seventh international workshop on Computing education research
Delta: a tool for representing and comparing workflows

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
SIG: end-user programming

CHI '12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Exploring hypotheses about media computation

Proceedings of the ninth annual international ACM conference on International computing education research
Towards a taxonomy of errors in HTML and CSS

Proceedings of the ninth annual international ACM conference on International computing education research

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.01

Visualization

Abstract

This paper reports on a study of professional web designers and developers. We provide a detailed characterization of their knowledge of fundamental programming concepts elicited through card sorting. Additionally, we present qualitative findings regarding their motivation to learn new concepts and the learning strategies they employ. We find a high level of recognition of basic concepts, but we identify a number of concepts that they do not fully understand, consider difficult to learn, and use infrequently. We also note that their learning process is motivated by work projects and often follows a pattern of trial and error. We conclude with implications for end-user programming researchers.