Computer Science Construct Use, Learning, and Creative Credit in a Graphic Design Community

End-users, who are projected to outnumber professional programmers in the next decade, present a unique opportunity to understand how computer science knowledge is acquired in the real world. We conducted an analysis of projects created by end-user programmers to discern their adoption of introductory computing constructs. A variety of project sizes were represented in the data, ranging from fewer than 100 lines of source code to greater than 1500. Many introductory computing constructs were highly adopted, but some were relatively unused. As these variations in adoption could be indications of topic complexity, we compared our findings to previous work in the novice programming literature. Additionally, a data-driven analysis provided insight into user sharing and reuse practices. Many distinct approaches to copyright and code ownership concerns were found in the projects studied, and their potential impact on end-user learning was considered. A short paper based on these results appears as: B. Dorn, A. E. Tew, and M. Guzdial. Introductory computing construct use in an end-user programming community. In VL/HCC’07: Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, pages 27–30, 2007 School of Interactive Computing College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA 30332-0760 Computer Science Construct Use, Learning, and Creative Credit in a Graphic Design Community Brian Dorn, Allison Elliott Tew, and Mark Guzdial School of Interactive Computing College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA 30332 {dorn, allison, guzdial}@cc.gatech.edu