Toward a domain-specific visual discussion forum for learning computer programming: An empirical study of a popular MOOC forum

摘要: Online discussion forums are one of the most ubiquitous kinds resources for people who learning computer programming. However, their user interface - a hierarchy textual threads has not changed much in past four decades. We argue that generic forum interfaces cumbersome programming and there is need domain-specific visual support this argument with an empirical study all 5,377 Introduction to Computer Science Programming Using Python, popular edX MOOC. Specifically, we investigated how participants were hampered by its text-based format. Most notably, often wanted discuss questions about dynamic execution state what happens “under hood” as runs code. propose better should be domain-specific, integrating automatically-generated visualizations enabling inline annotations source code output.