Thomas H. Park

Gender pluralism in problem-solving software

Although there has been significant research into gender regarding educational and workplace practices, there has been little awareness of gender differences as they pertain to software tools, such as spreadsheet applications, that try to support end users in problem-solving tasks. Although such software tools are intended to be gender agnostic, we believe that closer examination of this premise is warranted. Therefore, in this paper, we report an end-to-end investigation into gender differences with spreadsheet software. Our results showed gender differences in feature usage, feature-related confidence, and tinkering (playful exploration) with features. Then, drawing implications from these results, we designed and implemented features for our spreadsheet prototype that took the gender differences into account. The results of an evaluation on this prototype showed improvements for both males and females, and also decreased gender differences in some outcome measures, such as confidence. These results are encouraging, but also open new questions for investigation. We also discuss how our results compare to generalization studies performed with a variety of other software platforms and populations.

A Debugging Perspective on End-User Mashup Programming

In recent years, systems have emerged that enable end users to “mash” together existing web services to build new web sites. However, little is known about how well end users succeed at building such mashups, or what they do if they do not succeed at their first attempt. To help fill this gap, we took a fresh look, from a debugging perspective, at the approaches of end users as they attempted to create mashups. Our results reveal the end users’ debugging strategies and strategy barriers, the gender differences between the debugging strategies males and females followed and the features they used, and finally how their debugging successes and difficulties interacted with their design behaviors.

Learning web development: challenges at an earlier stage of computing education

Web development can provide a rich context for exploring computer science concepts and practicing computational creativity. However, little is known about the experiences that people have when first learning web development. In this paper, we investigate the help-seeking activity of forty-nine students in an introductory web development course. By applying content analysis to the help forums of the course, we characterize the challenges they encountered and sought help for, relating them to development, instruction, technology, content, and design issues. We apply a second level of content analysis to the development issues, identifying aspects of learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that challenged students most often. Finally, we identify several computational concepts that relate to these challenges, including notation, hierarchies and paths, nesting, parameters and arguments, and decomposition and abstraction. We conclude with a discussion on the implications of our findings for computing education.

An Analysis of HTML and CSS Syntax Errors in a Web Development Course

Many people are first exposed to code through web development, yet little is known about the barriers beginners face in these formative experiences. In this article, we describe a study of undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory web development course taken by both computing majors and general education students. Using data collected during the initial weeks of the course, we investigate the nature of the syntax errors they make when learning HTML and CSS, and how they resolve them. This is accomplished through the deployment of openHTML, a lightweight web-based code editor that logs user activity. Our analysis reveals that nearly all students made syntax errors that remained unresolved in their assessments, and that these errors continued weeks into the course. Approximately 20% of these errors related to the relatively complex system of rules that dictates when it is valid for HTML elements to be nested in one another. On the other hand, 35% of errors related to the relatively simple tag syntax determining how HTML elements are nested. We also find that validation played a key role in resolving errors: While the majority of unresolved errors were present in untested code, nearly all of the errors that were detected through validation were eventually corrected. We conclude with a discussion of our findings and their implications for computing education.

Towards a taxonomy of errors in HTML and CSS

As part of a larger research agenda to explore web development as a context for learning computational literacy skills, we investigate errors people make while writing code in HTML and CSS. We report on a lab-based study in which 20 participants were video recorded as they completed coding tasks. We have applied the skills-rules-knowledge framework to segment this data by the cognitive causes of errors they made, and present a taxonomy of these errors. Our findings demonstrate how the skills-rules-framework can be used to analyze coding errors, provide insight about the origins of these errors, and suggest ways that the design of web development tools can be improved to support learning and practice with HTML and CSS.

OpenHTML: designing a transitional web editor for novices

We describe the initial design rationale and early findings from studies of a web editor for beginners called openHTML. We explain our strategy of transitional design that views web editors as a part of a complex socio-technical system that spans multiple tools, practices, and actors. Our goal is to create a toolkit that can engage beginners in meaningful activities now and prepare them for more sophisticated activities in the future.

First Steps in Coding by Informal Web Developers

While prior research has investigated the practices of experienced web developers, little is known about the initial coding episodes of novices who are on the cusp of web development. Through interviews with library and information science students who have completed a web development course, we explore coding challenges that novices face and the emergence of strategies in response to them. Our results reveal that challenges arise from abstractions present in web development and their mismatch with WYSIWYG interfaces. These findings suggest new avenues for the design of web development tools that support the transitioning of non-coders into active web developers.

Children as webmakers: designing a web editor for beginners

In this short paper, we describe the design of a new web editor for beginners called openHTML and our initial evaluation with children aged 10 and 11 in an after-school web-building workshop. Drawing on data from verbally administered surveys and participant observation, we identified three kinds of engagement with the workshop tasks: a homework orientation, an artistic orientation, and a social orientation. We describe the kinds of scaffolding that the children needed to complete their web pages, the places where they struggled, and translate these observations into implications for the design of a web editor for children.

How people assess cooperatively authored information resources

This work in progress highlights late-breaking results and foreshadows opportunities for designing interfaces that help support credibility assessment of cooperatively authored information resources.

Supporting Novice Development of Webpage Layouts for Multiple Display Devices

As the types of devices capable of accessing the web diversify, developers face the challenge of tailoring webpage layouts to accommodate their different display, interaction, and use characteristics. This challenge is particularly severe for novice web developers, who often have difficulty maintaining the separation of content from presentation and comprehending the flow-based visual formatting model. We propose an approach to developing webpage layouts for multiple display devices that addresses these and other barriers commonly faced by novices. In this paper, we describe findings from a study of web design students and discuss their implications for this approach.