Online videos are a promising medium for older adults to learn. Yet, few studies have investigated what, how, and why they learn through online videos. In this study, we investigated older adults’ motivation, watching patterns, and difficulties in using ...
Motivating Adult Learners by Introducing Programming Concepts with Scratch
Novice programmers usually fail to combine abstract concepts and knowledge into program design, even though they know the syntax and semantics of individual statement. Adult novice programmers with little computer background knowledge might face more ...
I Started Programming When I Was 7. I'm 50 Now, and the Thing I Loved Has Changed | James Randall
I still love developing but the shifts that AI have brought are tectonic and are forcing me to re-evaluate my own relationship to building things
Programming as Theory Building: Why Senior Developers Are More Valuable Than Ever
Peter Naur's 1985 theory of programming explains why experience matters more in the age of AI-generated code
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about programming, or that programming is somehow fabulously easier to learn than anything else. Felleisen et al. give a nod to this trend in their book How to Design Programs, when they say "Bad programming is easy. Idiots can learn it in 21 days, even if they are dummies." The Abtruse Goose comic also had their take.
I’m learning to code at 56. Here’s an epic beat-down of my critical inner self.
By VM Vaughn I’m 56 years old and learning to code. Why? Because I love it. And I’ve got a knack for it. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. It’s hard. And that’s OK. I love losing myself in an algorithm challenge. I love squeezing in a few extra minutes te...
What Makes Software a "Place"?
How to keep learning in the age of LLMs | Oğuzhan Olguncu
Notes on how I keep learning as a programmer in the age of LLMs
What I've Learnt After Making My First Hobby Game
A lot of people (myself included) get into software development because of computer games — as a kid, I was amazed at computer games and always curious about how it was made. However, after finally getting into the industry, most people (myself included) end up not doing game development.
Stripped Down Browsers
I started learning programming in High School by using a toy language with graphics.
Anatomy of an Enduring Gender Gap: The Evolution of Women’s Participation in Computer Science
Given growing interest in computing fields, as well as a longstanding gender gap in computer science, this study used nationwide survey data on college students during 4 decades to: (a) document tr...
Addressing Accessibility Barriers in Programming for People with Visual Impairments: A Literature Review
Accessibility issues with programming languages and programming environments pose a major barrier for students with visual impairments to participate in computing related courses as well as threatens the productivity of professional programmers with visual impairments. To remedy this, the past two decades have witnessed an increase in accessibility research designed to investigate and address the challenges faced by people with visual impairments while programming or learning how to program. We conducted a literature review of accessibility research in this domain. The aim was to identify, aggregate, and highlight known accessibility barriers to programming faced by professional programmers and students with visual impairments learning how to code as well as to identify all solutions that have been proposed to address these barriers. We selected and analyzed 70 papers reporting on accessibility of programming and programming environments for people with visual impairments. Numerous barriers to programming by people with visual impairments have been identified in the literature. Some of these barriers are understudied and present opportunities for future work. A lot of studies have also proposed tools and new accessible programming languages to address the accessibility issues of current programming languages and programming environments.
Exploratory and Live, Programming and Coding: A Literature Study Comparing Perspectives on Liveness
Various programming tools, languages, and environments give programmers the impression of changing a program while it is running. This experience of liveness has been discussed for over two decades and a broad spectrum of research on this topic exists. Amongst others, this work has been carried out in the communities around three major ideas which incorporate liveness as an important aspect: live programming, exploratory programming, and live coding. While there have been publications on the focus of each particular community, the overall spectrum of liveness across these three communities has not been investigated yet. Thus, we want to delineate the variety of research on liveness. At the same time, we want to investigate overlaps and differences in the values and contributions between the three communities. Therefore, we conducted a literature study with a sample of 212 publications on the terms retrieved from three major indexing services. On this sample, we conducted a thematic analysis regarding the following aspects: motivation for liveness, application domains, intended outcomes of running a system, and types of contributions. We also gathered bibliographic information such as related keywords and prominent publications. Besides other characteristics the results show that the field of exploratory programming is mostly about technical designs and empirical studies on tools for general-purpose programming. In contrast, publications on live coding have the most variety in their motivations and methodologies with a majority being empirical studies with users. As expected, most publications on live coding are applied to performance art. Finally, research on live programming is mostly motivated by making programming more accessible and easier to understand, evaluating their tool designs through empirical studies with users. In delineating the spectrum of work on liveness, we hope to make the individual communities more aware of the work of the others. Further, by giving an overview of the values and methods of the individual communities, we hope to provide researchers new to the field of liveness with an initial overview.
Reflections of an "Old" Programmer - Ben Northrop
Framing our programming careers in terms of knowledge accumulation and decay can yield some interesting insights.
We asked 15,000 people who they are, and how they’re learning to code
More than 15,000 people responded to the 2016 New Coder Survey, granting researchers an unprecedented glimpse into how adults are learning to code. We’ve released the entire dataset of participants’ individual responses to all 48 questions — under th...
