Student Experiences with GitHub and Stack Overflow: An Exploratory Study
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
Programmers who want to improve their skills in software development rely heavily on developer social platforms such as GitHub and Stack Overflow to enhance their learning. Stack Overflow provides answers to questions they have about languages or library skills they wish to acquire, while contributing to open-source projects hosted on sites like GitHub gives them valuable experience. Students also use these platforms during their education: most will rely heavily on Stack Overflow at some point in their schooling, while many can benefit from contributing to GitHub projects to build their expertise and professional portfolios. We already know from previous research that developers face barriers participating on these platforms, so we may expect that at least some students will experience similar barriers and possibly even bigger challenges. This paper describes a semi-structured interview study with university students to explore how they use the GitHub and Stack Overflow platforms. We identify the barriers they face and benefits they report from using these tools. We conclude with some preliminary recommendations on how to reduce the hurdles students may face with these and other developer social platforms, and suggest future work to mitigate these roadblocks.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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