Building Tools to Help Students Learn to Program

My current research trajectory centers on what I call learning programming at scale. Decades of prior research have worked to improve how computer programming is taught in traditional K–12 and university classrooms, but the vast majority of people around the world--children in low-income areas, working adults with full-time jobs, the fast-growing population of older adults, and millions in developing countries--do not have access to high-quality classroom learning environments. Thus, the central question that drives my research is: How can we better understand the millions of people from diverse backgrounds who are now learning programming online and then design scalable software to support their learning goals? One critical prerequisite for improving how programming is taught is to understand why and how people are currently learning and what obstacles they face. To work toward this goal, I have been studying traditionally under-represented learner populations and non-traditional learning environments.