Studies of Programmers: How can they inform training and instruction?

December 11, 2006
Beth Simon | University of California, San Diego

After 40-mumble years of higher education-based computer science instruction, what do we know about how students learn computing? What can students accomplish after one year? What common problems exist? While anecdotal answers can be gathered to all these questions through a post to the CS educators listserv – what “real” data do we have to answer these questions? In this talk, I’ll review recent highlights of work in describing the competencies and behaviors of novice programmers. I’ll discuss the potentials for quantitative and qualitative studies, describe work in progress in the area of resources students bring to the study of computing and analysis of novice bug location strategies. Finally, I’ll overview a planned study to identify skills critical to beginning software developers in industry.

Speaker Details

Beth Simon has a bizarrely titled, education-focused, faculty position in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from UCSD in 2001. Beth’s interests lie in various types of computer science education research, especially multi-institutional studies of programmers. Beth is a co-developer (with William Griswold) of Ubiquitous Presenter – a Tablet PC-based system designed to make students both the focus and source of control in the classroom learning environment. http://up.ucsd.edu