Perceptions of non-CS majors in intro programming: The rise of the conversational programmer
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the enthusiasm and initiatives for making programming accessible to students outside Computer Science (CS), unfortunately, there are still many unanswered questions about how we should be teaching programming to engineers, scientists, artists or other non-CS majors. We present an in-depth case study of first-year management engineering students enrolled in a required introductory programming course at a large North American university. Based on an inductive analysis of one-on-one interviews, surveys, and weekly observations, we provide insights into students' motivations, career goals, perceptions of programming, and reactions to the Java and Processing languages. One of our key findings is that between the traditional classification of non-programmers vs. programmers, there exists a category of conversational programmers who do not necessarily want to be professional programmers or even end-user programmers, but want to learn programming so that they can speak in the “programmer's language” and improve their perceived job marketability in the software industry.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it