Designing Designer
Kristina Holsapple, Austin Cory Bart · Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education · 2022
As a solution to the challenge of motivating and retaining undergraduate introductory computer science students, game development and image manipulation are popular motivational contexts in introductory computer science (CS1) classrooms. However, there has been little research on how to empirically make the required code libraries friendly for novice learners. This work explores how novice preconceptions of vocabulary and code structure should affect Designer (https://krishols.github.io/designer), our new pedagogical interactive graphics Python library. Preconceptions were measured through two successive surveys. Survey responses were analyzed for differences between survey version and students' prior programming experience. Although specific preconceptions varied based on students' degrees of prior programming experience, students do tend to prefer simple vocabulary. Motivated to fill a gap in the libraries available for early Python education, these results were used to guide the development of Designer. Alongside the library, this work provides three successive CS1 lesson plans developed using the Use-Modify-Create lesson progression. Future work is in progress to measure and improve the usability of Designer and its resources through further collaboration with students, to ultimately create a truly novice friendly game and graphics API.