Article

Graphic designers who program as informal computer science learners

Authors:

Mark GuzdialAuthors Info & Claims

ICER '06: Proceedings of the second international workshop on Computing education research

Pages 127 - 134

https://doi.org/10.1145/1151588.1151608

Published: 09 September 2006 Publication History

Abstract

We introduce end-user programmers as a group of persons engaged in informal Computer Science education. Results of a small-scale survey for a previously unstudied population of end-users, users of graphics manipulation software, are presented. We find that graphic designers are taking part in significant programming activities, despite little to no formal training in programming. We discuss what draws them to programming, what they know about Computer Science, and where they seek help. We also consider ways in which we might further support the Computer Science learning that takes place in end-user settings.

References

[1]

Adobe Systems Incorporated, San Jose, CA. Adobe Photoshop CS2 JavaScript Scripting Reference, 2005. Available online: http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/photoshop/sdk/JavaScriptReferenceGuide.pdf.

[2]

A. Bruckman. Situated support for learning: Storm's weekend with Rachael. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 9(3):329--372, 2000.

[3]

A. Bruckman, C. Jensen, and A. DeBonte. Gender and programming achievement in a cscl environment. In G. Stahl, editor, Proceedings of CSCL 2002, pages 119--127, 2002.

Digital Library

[4]

M. Burnett, C. Cook, O. Pendse, G. Rothermel, J. Summet, and C. Wallace. End-user software engineering with assertions in the spreadsheet paradigm. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'03), pages 93--103, 2003.

Digital Library

[5]

Center for Children and Technology. Evaluation of the Intel Computer Clubhouse network: Year 2 report. Research Rep., New York, NY, September 2002.

[6]

C. DiGiano and M. Eisenberg. Self-disclosing design tools: a gentle introduction to end-user programming. In DIS '95: Proceedings of the Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, pages 189--197, New York, NY, USA, 1995. ACM Press.

Digital Library

[7]

A. Forte and M. Guzdial. Motivation and non-majors in computer science: Identifying discrete audiences for introductory courses. IEEE Transactions on Education, 48(2):248--253, 2005.

Digital Library

[8]

M. Fowler. Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code. Addison-Wesley, Aug. 1999.

Digital Library

[9]

T. L. Friedman. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, NY, 2005.

Digital Library

[10]

A. K. Goel, J. L. Kolodner, M. Pearce, R. Billington, and C. Zimring. Towards a case-based tool for aiding conceptual design problem solving. In Proc. of the Case-Based Reasoning Workshop, pages 109--120, Washington, D.C., 1991.

[11]

M. Guzdial, L. Hohmann, M. Konneman, C. Walton, and E. Soloway. Supporting programming and learning-to-program with an integrated CAD and scaffolding workbench. Interactive Learning Environments, 6(1/2):143--179, 1998.

[12]

M. Guzdial and C. Kehoe. Apprenticeship-based learning environments: A principled approach to providing software-realized scaffolding through hypermedia. Journal of Interactive Learning Research, 9(3/4):289--336, 1998.

Digital Library

[13]

B. A. Nardi. A Small Matter of Programming: Perspectives on End User Computing. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993.

Digital Library

[14]

R. R. Panko. Finding spreadsheet errors: Most spreadsheet models have design flaws that may lead to long-term miscalculation. Information Week, (529):100, May 1995.

[15]

R. R. Panko. What we know about spreadsheet errors. Journal of End User Computing, 10(2):15--21, 1998.

Digital Library

[16]

M. B. Rosson, J. Ballin, and J. Rode. Who, what, and how: A survey of informal and professional web developers. In Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, 2005 IEEE Symposium on, pages 199--206, 2005.

Digital Library

[17]

C. Scaffidi, A. Ko, B. Myers, and M. Shaw. Identifiying categories of end users based on the abstractions that they create. Technical Report CMU-ISRI-05-110, Institute for Software Research, International, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, December 2005.

[18]

C. Scaffidi, M. Shaw, and B. Myers. Estimating the numbers of end users and end user programmers. In Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, 2005 IEEE Symposium on, pages 207--214, 2005.

Digital Library

[19]

I. Sommerville. Software Engineering. Addison-Wesley, Harlow, UK, fifth edition, 1996.

Digital Library

[20]

J. Spohrer and E. Soloway. Putting it all together is hard for novice programmers. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, November 1985.

[21]

C. Titmus. Lifelong Education for Adults: An International Handbook. Pergamon, Oxford, UK, 1989.

[22]

J. Vegso. Interest in CS as a major drops among incoming freshmen. Computing Research News, 17(3), 2005.

Cited By

Payne WKaney MRodrigues IHurst A(2025)Exploring Technical and Creative Posts in Online Live Coding Communities: An Analysis of Tidal Club and in_threadCompanion Proceedings of the 2025 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work10.1145/3688828.3699634(15-21)Online publication date: 12-Jan-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3688828.3699634
Simko LHutchinson AIsaac AFries ESherr MAviv ALuo BLiao XXu JKirda ELie D(2024)"Modern problems require modern solutions": Community-Developed Techniques for Online Exam Proctoring EvasionProceedings of the 2024 on ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3658644.3691638(2681-2695)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3658644.3691638
Schenck LDiSalvo B(2023)From Data Work to Data Science: Getting Past the GatekeepersProceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 210.1145/3568812.3603468(1-2)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3568812.3603468
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Graphic designers who program as informal computer science learners

Recommendations

End-User Software Engineering and Why it Matters

End-user programming has become ubiquitous; so much so that there are more end-user programmers today than there are professional programmers. End-user programming empowers-but to do what? Make bad decisions based on bad programs? Enter software ...
What Is End-User Software Engineering and Why Does It Matter?
IS-EUD 2009: Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on End-User Development - Volume 5435

End-user programming has become ubiquitous, so much so that there are more end-user programmers today than there are professional programmers. End-user programming empowers--but to do what? Make really bad decisions based on really bad programs? Enter ...
Digital media in informal learning activities
Abstract
This study aims to investigate digital media in the context of informal educational activities to determine their impact on learning effectiveness and the level of participant engagement. It was assumed that the integration of digital media into ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICER '06: Proceedings of the second international workshop on Computing education research

September 2006

144 pages

ISBN:1595934944

DOI:10.1145/1151588

Program Chairs:
Richard Anderson
University of Washington, Seattle, USA
,
Sally A. Fincher
University of Kent at Canterbury, UK
,
Mark Guzdial
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA

Copyright © 2006 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 09 September 2006

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

ICER06

Sponsor:

ICER06: International Computing Education Research Workshop 2006

September 9 - 10, 2006

Canterbury, United Kingdom

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 189 of 803 submissions, 24%

Upcoming Conference

ICER 2025

Sponsor:
sigcse

ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research

August 3 - 6, 2025

Charlottesville , VA , USA

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

53
Total Citations
View Citations
562
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)8
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 05 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Payne WKaney MRodrigues IHurst A(2025)Exploring Technical and Creative Posts in Online Live Coding Communities: An Analysis of Tidal Club and in_threadCompanion Proceedings of the 2025 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work10.1145/3688828.3699634(15-21)Online publication date: 12-Jan-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3688828.3699634
Simko LHutchinson AIsaac AFries ESherr MAviv ALuo BLiao XXu JKirda ELie D(2024)"Modern problems require modern solutions": Community-Developed Techniques for Online Exam Proctoring EvasionProceedings of the 2024 on ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3658644.3691638(2681-2695)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3658644.3691638
Schenck LDiSalvo B(2023)From Data Work to Data Science: Getting Past the GatekeepersProceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 210.1145/3568812.3603468(1-2)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3568812.3603468
Payne WAhmed FGardell MDuBois RHurst AAhmetovic DYaneva V(2022)SoundCellsProceedings of the 19th International Web for All Conference10.1145/3493612.3520462(1-12)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3493612.3520462
Chaudhury RGuo PChilana P(2022)"There’s no way to keep up!": Diverse Motivations and Challenges Faced by Informal Learners of ML2022 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VL/HCC53370.2022.9833100(1-11)Online publication date: 12-Sep-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/VL/HCC53370.2022.9833100
Peña JHanrahan BRosson MCole C(2021)After-Hours LearningACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/344696421:2(1-31)Online publication date: 9-Mar-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3446964
Griffin JCarter JBecker BBrown N(2019)Designing Intentional Bugs for LearningProceedings of the 2019 Conference on United Kingdom & Ireland Computing Education Research10.1145/3351287.3351289(1-7)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3351287.3351289
Qingxin XWada AKorpela JMaekawa TNamioka Y(2019)Unsupervised Factory Activity Recognition with Wearable Sensors Using Process Instruction InformationProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/33289313:2(1-23)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3328931
Liaqat DAbdalla MAbed-Esfahani PGabel MSon TWu RGershon ARudzicz FLara E(2019)WearBreathingProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/33289273:2(1-22)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3328927
Gullapalli BNatarajan AAngarita GMalison RGanesan DRahman T(2019)On-body Sensing of Cocaine Craving, Euphoria and Drug-Seeking Behavior Using Cardiac and Respiratory SignalsProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/33289173:2(1-31)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3328917
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents