EXP: Readily Available Learning Experiences: Turning the Entire Web into Scaffolded Examples to Bridge Conceptual Knowledge Gaps for Novice Web Developers

Project: Research project

Project Details

Description

There is a massive need to train more future computer scientists to meet the demands of our 21st Century workforce. Online learning platforms such as CodeAcademy attract millions of novice learners and expand the pool of advanced beginners. However, critical gaps in knowledge and experience remain between advanced beginners and professionals. This is in part because current learning platforms focus on procedural learning through toy examples that do not provide the deep understanding needed for professional-quality work. Professional websites offer rich details missing from training examples, content that relates to the real world, and opportunities to think in the models of the discipline. However, despite the abundant availability of front-end code, website source code is difficult to read and often contains superfluous details that can distract from learning core concepts. How might we use the entire web of professional examples to address the conceptual knowledge gap for large numbers of novice web developers? Despite the abundant availability of front-end code, most professional code examples are complex; they may be difficult for learners to understand as-is and contain superfluous details that distract learning core concepts. Even after identifying relevant portions of code, there’s a challenge in surfacing conceptual knowledge, creating scaffolds that help learners apply those concepts, and supporting transfer across examples so that concepts can be flexibly applied in a variety of contexts. The proposed research will enable readily available learning experiences, namely the ability for learners to approach every professional website as a resource for learning programming concepts. We will accomplish this by creating cyberlearning technologies that help learners (1) identify relevant code snippets from complex professional examples, (2) surface higher-order abstractions of programming concepts, (3) apply concepts by writing code, and (4) transfer learnin
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date9/1/178/31/22

Funding

  • National Science Foundation (IIS-1735977)

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