Collaborative Interventions for Novices to Learn Programming (CAPS)

This research focuses on studying collaborative learning interactions that may facilitate the construction of pedagogically rich programming learning experiences for novices. We are particularly interested in understanding how an individual’s programming learning behaviour unfolds in a social learning context. We intend to foster novices’ learning behaviour by designing interventions for programming platforms that help mediate collaborative interactions amongst learners for a positive learning outcome and thereby also enhancing their programming learning experience.

In the first research project, we explore assisting students’ co-regulation and their learning motivation, in an online introductory programming classroom. We designed Thyone, a collaborative Jupyter Notebook extension to support learners’ programming regulation in an online classroom context with the overall aim to foster their intrinsic motivation toward programming. Thyone’s salient features – Flowchart, Discuss and Share Cell – incorporate affordances for learners to co-regulate their learning and drive their motivation. We evaluated Thyone’s usage effect and through our findings we inform the design of technological interventions to foster novices’ programming co-regulation and sustain their motivation. Our study is published in ACM CSCW 2023.

In the next study, we focus on hybrid learning modalities for learning programming, where learners can take a course in person or remotely. We focus on the context of an introductory programming classroom, where novices’ collaborative interactions with peers in hybrid learning modes are more nuanced than in traditional settings. Adopting a user-centred approach, we conducted a participatory design study with nine students from a hybrid-taught first-year programming course. Our findings highlight the challenges students face and the design needs for programming workspaces in hybrid settings. Based on our findings, we discuss design principles and implications to inform the future design of collaborative programming environments for hybrid modes. The results of the participatory design study are published in a flagship design conference: ACM DIS 2023.

Project Leaders : Lahari Goswami

UNIL Collaborators : Mauro Cherubini,  Thibault Estier, Marc-Olivier Boldi, Yiyuan Fang

Past Collaborators : Alexandre Senges, Olivier Charrez, Pegah Sadat Zeinoddin

Publications :

  1. Lahari Goswami, Alexandre Senges, Thibault Estier, and Mauro Cherubini. 2023. Supporting Co-Regulation and Motivation in Learning Programming in Online Classrooms. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 7, CSCW2, Article 298 (October 2023), 29 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3610089
  2. Lahari Goswami, Pegah Sadat Zeinoddin, Thibault Estier, and Mauro Cherubini. 2023. Supporting Collaboration in Introductory Programming Classes Taught in Hybrid Mode: A Participatory Design Study. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’23), July 10–14, 2023, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596042