[IAEP] Why Is programming an unnatural activity?

[Steve Thomas]

So I am sharing my blog post Why Is programming an unnatural activity?Hoping
to get some feedback from the community.

For my P2PU course I have been looking at "Novice" programmers.  And in one
of the papers we were asked to read Mark Guzdial asks:

“Why?” Is programming an unnatural activity?

Could programming be made easier in a different form?

Could programming be taught in a different way that makes learning easier?

Or maybe we just have no idea how to actually measure what students know
about programming.* (1).*

My main problem with the Guzdial paper (this was more my problem than a
problem with the paper) is I felt it didn't provide enough details or
specifics on "Why it is so hard to learn to Program?"  I need specifics and
examples to get my head around things.  Roy Pea, was a great find and
perhaps not surprisingly (for me at least) the Resnick article was very
useful.

Pea (et al) talked about three classes of bugs:

   1. Parallelism Bugs
   2. Intentionality Bugs
   3. Egocentrism Bugs

*Parrallelism Bugs*
The Parallelism Bugs, is basically an "assumption of different lines in a
program can be active or known by the computer at the same time or
in parallel".  For example, look at this code:


If (Size == 10)
    print "Hello"
For Size in range(10):
    print Size

When High School students. in their second year of programming course, were
asked what they thought the program would print 8 out of 15 predicted
"Hello" would print after "10".

*Intentionality Bugs*
The Intentionality Bugs, is the idea in the child's mind that "the program
has goals and knows or sees what will happen elsewhere in itself."

*Egocentrism Bugs*
The Egocentrism Bugs, stem from the belief that there "is more of their
meaning for what they want to accomplish in the program than is actually
present in the code."  Funny, I see these kinds of bugs all the time in my
code and those of other experience programmers :)

*The Super Bug*
He concludes that all these derive from the Super Bug:

<http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sQRGOhtVBbM/T03XIvqxgvI/AAAAAAAABBg/itlJA6dtKhU/s1600/SuperBug%0D.png>
The idea that there is a "hidden mind somewhere inside the programming
language that has intelligent and interpretive powers."  Not surprising
since most of kids experiences are with semi-intelligent beings (aka
Parents)

MultiLogo: A Study of Children and Concurrent Programming - Mitchel
Resnick<http://llk.media.mit.edu/papers/MultiLogo.html>
Resnick, noted that:

"This sequential paradigm does not match the way the real world works:
people and animals act in parallel, objects interact in parallel. As a
result, many real-world activities can not be modelled in a natural way
with sequential programming."

Thus developed a concurrent or parrallel version of Logo (Multi-Logo), so
they kids had a language/environment that more closely matched their view
of the world.  Although he did not go "parrallel" enough, and in his
lessons learned asked "

*SideNote*: I used to think and say that Concurrent Programming was really
really hard.  I had plenty of evidence to back this up and had heard and
read much smarter people than me saying the same thing.  Then I encountered
Etoys (and later Scratch) and started teaching these to kids.  And realized
that Concurrent Programming is actually easier (although you do have the
added complexity of syntonization issues) .  The problem was not the
topic/idea, it was the language we use to think about it.

Resnick noted that "In general, students appropriated the idea of agents
sending messages to one another quite easily."  Too bad we don't teach more
Smalltalk.
He identified three types of bugs specific to concurrent programming:

   1. Problem Decomposition Bugs
   2. Synchronization Bugs
   3. Object Oriented Bugs

*Problem Decomposition Bugs*
"These bugs arise out of students' difficulties decomposing problems into
actions to be performed concurrently by multiple agents."  Here there are
two types of decomposition:

   1. functional decomposition - dividing a problem in to simpler
   sub-problems (what needs to be done)
   2. agency decomposition - dividing the functional pieces among different
   agents (who does it)


*Synchronization Bugs*

"These bugs arise out of students' difficulties coordinating and
orchestrating the activities of multiple agents."
These bugs he divides into two type: Unintended Sequentiality and
Unintended Concurrency. In these cases the student expected Sequetiality
and got Concurrence (or vice versa).

It seems that in designing Multi-Logo to deal with synchronization he
provided two mechanisms: ask and demand.  Where when you "ask" an agent
something (ex: flash light -  for 20 seconds) the request is queued up to
be executed in the order received. When you "demand" the agent interrupts
what is going on to perform the request (or it might simply put it at the
head of the queue, I am not sure).  It is interesting, at least to me, that
Scratch, developed later by Resnick and his team,  got rid of the ask and
demand and went with a "broadcast" "wait" and "do for X seconds" to allow
for synchronization.  I believe this simplifies and avoids a number of
problems for novice programmers.

*Object Oriented Bugs*
"These bugs arise out of students' confusion among different types of
"objects"  Multi-Logo has multiple types of objects: agents, turtle, and on
the Lego Interface box (think early NXT) ports and sensors.  Part of this
confusion may have been the overloading of "halt" which for an agent,
Another quote for Guzial:

   - " our current programming languages do not allow people to program the
   way that they think about the tasks"
   - Section: "Making tools better by shifting to Visual Programming"
   - "having students build their own visualizations had significant impact
   on those students’ learning."


*Resnick's Lessons Learned*
"It is a good idea for students to "play agent"--that is, act out what each
agent is supposed to do. This activity requires a group of students, each
playing the role of a different agent."  I really like this approach with
novices and often warn students "Step away from the computer and no one
will get hurt".  Having them act out the program and program each other is
a good way to do this.
In designing Multi-Logo he realized he did not go far enough
in parallelism: "An alternate approach, of course, is to change the design
of MultiLogo to match students' preconceptions. For example, I could
redesign MultiLogo agents so that each agent could do several things at the
same time, in line with students' expectations of "excessive parallelism."
 He later did have agents that can do several things at the same time.
He also discussed the idea of design the environment match the students
pre-conceptions. Would be interesting to find out what problems it solves
(and those it doesn't) and what new problems it creates.


FInally, for a real treat* *at some possibilities for a new programming
environment see this:

Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle <http://vimeo.com/36579366> from
CUSEC<http://vimeo.com/cusec>
 on Vimeo <http://vimeo.com/>.

References:
NOTE: If you have limited time, I would recommend reading (2) then (5),
then for a real treat watch the Brett Victor talk (7)
(1) Why Is It So Hard to Learn to Program - Mark Guzdial
(2) Children's Mental Models of Recursive LOGO Programs - D. Midian Kurland
and Roy D. Pea (1985)<http://www.stanford.edu/~roypea/RoyPDF%20folder/A27_Kurland_Pea_85.pdf>
(3) Language Independent Conceptual "Bugs" in Novice Programming - Roy D.
Pea (1986) <http://www.stanford.edu/~roypea/RoyPDF%20folder/A28_Pea_86.pdf>
(4) The Buggy Path to the Development of Programming Expertise - Roy D. Pea
and Elliot Soloway
(1987)<http://www.stanford.edu/~roypea/RoyPDF%20folder/A32_Pea_etal_87.pdf>
(5) MultiLogo: A Study of Children and Concurrent Programming - Mitchel
Resnick <http://llk.media.mit.edu/papers/MultiLogo.html> (1990)
(6) Programming Environments for Novices - Mark Guzdial
(2002)<http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/guzdial/uploads/18/novice-envs.pdf>
(7) Brett Victor - Inventing on Principle
(2012)<http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCkQtwIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fvimeo.com%2F36579366&ei=KsZNT67SJ4GCgwf1-Lm_Ag&usg=AFQjCNGHACfYpq0IFm1Krb2xBGWAF-_JLw&sig2=eGsjoGhKYkMHkr4HmZLCyw>
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