Abstract

This paper focuses on a historically understudied area in computing education: attending to students’ *design thinking* in university-level introductory programming courses. I offer an account of one student—“Rebecca”—and her experiences and code from a second-semester course on programming concepts for engineers. Using data from both code snapshots and clinical interviews, I explicate both the challenges of studying students’ software design processes and the potential for such study to inform accounts of teaching and learning. My analysis focuses on two related aspects of Rebecca’s code for a multi-week class project: 1. The origin, nature, and evolution of unusual structural and behavioral features of Rebecca’s code 2. The subtle, yet complex reasons that led Rebecca to make particular design choices in her codeMy data comes from ethnographic observation of Rebecca’s class, fine-grained compile-time snapshots of Rebecca’s codebase, and semistructured interviews with Rebecca. I first present an analysis of only Rebecca’s final submitted code (what an instructor would typically see) detailing Rebecca’s unusual use of file-scanning loops and her seven-fold repetition of a particular code chunk (once for each day of the week). I then augment that analysis with code snapshot history and data from semi-structured interviews with Rebecca. This augmented analysis reveals _affect_ [@hannula_affect_2004; @eynde_case_2006] and _framing_ [@van_de_sande_achieving_2012; @mestre_resources_2005] offer substantial explanatory power for understanding why Rebecca made particular design choices.

摘要

本文重点关注计算机教育中一个历史上未被充分研究的领域：在大学级别的编程入门课程中关注学生的*设计思维*。我提供了一个学生——“丽贝卡”——以及她在第二学期工程师编程概念课程中的经历和代码。使用来自代码快照和临床访谈的数据，我解释了研究学生软件设计过程的挑战以及此类研究为教学和学习提供信息的潜力。我的分析集中在一个多周课程项目中丽贝卡代码的两个相关方面： 1. 丽贝卡代码不寻常的结构和行为特征的起源、性质和演变 2. 微妙的、导致 Rebecca 在她的代码中做出特定设计选择的复杂原因我的数据来自对 Rebecca 班级的民族志观察、Rebecca 代码库的细粒度编译时快照以及对 Rebecca 的半结构化访谈。我首先只对 Rebecca 最终提交的代码（教师通常会看到的）进行分析，详细说明 Rebecca 对文件扫描循环的不寻常使用以及她对特定代码块的七次重复（一周中的每一天一次）。然后，我使用代码快照历史记录和来自 Rebecca 的半结构化访谈数据来增强该分析。这种增强的分析揭示了_affect_ [@hannula_affect_2004; @eynde_case_2006] 和 _framing_ [@van_de_sande_achieving_2012;