It's like computers speak a different language
Gregor Große-Bölting, Yannick Schneider, Andreas Mühling · 2019
Students who enter university to study computer science have varying motivations, prior exposure to, and knowledge about computer science (CS). Accordingly, they have a great range of ideas about what their chosen subject is, often, as previous research has shown, rather unclear ideas. As part of a longitudinal research project, we conducted surveys and interviews with freshmen and thus collected students' ideas of what computer science means to them. As a result, we present a classification of five prevalent types of beginning students that we identified qualitatively and quantitative support for the types. The types align partly with previous research results. We discuss the types and their potential (dis-)advantages in their CS studies.