More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/

research-article

Open access

Improv: Teaching Programming at Scale via Live Coding

Authors:

Charles H. Chen,

Philip J. GuoAuthors Info & Claims

L@S '19: Proceedings of the Sixth (2019) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale

Article No.: 9, Pages 1 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/3330430.3333627

Published: 24 June 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Computer programming instructors frequently perform live coding in settings ranging from MOOC lecture videos to online livestreams. However, there is little tool support for this mode of teaching, so presenters must now either screen-share or use generic slideshow software. To overcome the limitations of these formats, we propose that programming environments should directly facilitate live coding for education. We prototyped this idea by creating Improv, an IDE extension for preparing and delivering code-based presentations informed by Mayer's principles of multimedia learning. Improv lets instructors synchronize blocks of code and output with slides and create preset waypoints to guide their presentations. A case study on 30 educational videos containing 28 hours of live coding showed that Improv was versatile enough to replicate approximately 96% of the content within those videos. In addition, a preliminary user study on four teaching assistants showed that Improv was expressive enough to allow them to make their own custom presentations in a variety of styles and improvise by live coding in response to simulated audience questions. Users mentioned that Improv lowered cognitive load by minimizing context switching and made it easier to fix errors on-the-fly than using slide-based presentations.

References

[1]

2018. Ableton: Music production with Live and Push. https://www.ableton.com/en/. (2018).

[2]

2018. Atom IDE. https://ide.atom.io/. (2018).

[3]

2018. AWS Cloud9: A cloud IDE for writing, running, and debugging code. https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9/?origin=c9io. (2018).

[4]

2018. Meteor: Build Apps with JavaScript. https://www.meteor.com/. (2018).

[5]

2018. Oculus Rift - Oculus. https://www.oculus.com/rift/. (2018).

[6]

2018. Open Broadcaster Software. https://obsproject.com/. (2018).

[7]

2018. reveal.js - The HTML Presentation Framework. https://revealjs.com/. (2018).

[8]

2018. Visual Studio Live Share: Real-time collaborative development. https://code.visualstudio.com/visual-studio-live-share. (2018).

[9]

2018. Waypoint (Wikipedia). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waypoint. (2018).

[10]

2018. Wireshark - Go Deep. https://www.wireshark.org/. (2018).

[11]

Damian Avila. 2017. RISE: Reveal.js - Jupyter/IPython Slideshow Extension. https://damianavila.github.io/RISE/index.html. (2017).

[12]

Lecia J. Barker, Kathy Garvin-Doxas, and Eric Roberts. 2005. What Can Computer Science Learn from a Fine Arts Approach to Teaching?. In Proceedings of the 36th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '05). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 421--425.

Digital Library

[13]

Benjamin B. Bederson and James D. Hollan. 1994. Pad++: A Zooming Graphical Interface for Exploring Alternate Interface Physics. In Proceedings of the 7th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '94). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 17--26.

Digital Library

[14]

Richard Catrambone. 1998. The Subgoal Learning Model: Creating Better Examples so That Students Can Solve Novel Problems. 127 (12 1998), 355--376.

[15]

Pei-Yu Chi, Bongshin Lee, and Steven M. Drucker. 2014. DemoWiz: Re-performing Software Demonstrations for a Live Presentation. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1581--1590.

Digital Library

[16]

Darren Edge, Sumit Gulwani, Natasa Milic-Frayling, Mohammad Raza, Reza Adhitya Saputra, Chao Wang, and Koji Yatani. 2015. Mixed-Initiative Approaches to Global Editing in Slideware. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3503--3512.

Digital Library

[17]

Darren Edge, Joan Savage, and Koji Yatani. 2013. HyperSlides: Dynamic Presentation Prototyping. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 671--680.

Digital Library

[18]

Alessio Gaspar and Sarah Langevin. 2007. Restoring "Coding with Intention" in Introductory Programming Courses. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGITE Conference on Information Technology Education (SIGITE '07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 91--98.

Digital Library

[19]

Lance Good and Benjamin B. Bederson. 2002. Zoomable User Interfaces As a Medium for Slide Show Presentations. Information Visualization 1, 1 (March 2002), 35--49.

[20]

Philip J. Guo, Jeffery White, and Renan Zanelatto. 2015. Codechella: Multi-user program visualizations for real-time tutoring and collaborative learning. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) (VL/HCC '15). 79--87.

[21]

Suz Hinton. 2017. Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch. https://medium.freecodecamp.org/lessons-from-my-first-year-of-live-coding-on-twitch-41a32e2f41c1. (2017).

[22]

Thomas Kluyver, Benjamin Ragan-Kelley, Fernando Pérez, Brian Granger, Matthias Bussonnier, Jonathan Frederic, Kyle Kelley, Jessica Hamrick, Jason Grout, Sylvain Corlay, Paul Ivanov, Damián Avila, Safia Abdalla, and Carol Willing. 2016. Jupyter Notebooks - a publishing format for reproducible computational workflows. In Positioning and Power in Academic Publishing: Players, Agents and Agendas, F. Loizides and B. Schmidt (Eds.). IOS Press, 87--90.

[23]

Leonhard Lichtschlag, Thorsten Karrer, and Jan Borchers. 2009. Fly: A Tool to Author Planar Presentations. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 547--556.

Digital Library

[24]

Lauren E. Margulieux, Mark Guzdial, and Richard Catrambone. 2012. Subgoal-labeled Instructional Material Improves Performance and Transfer in Learning to Develop Mobile Applications. In Proceedings of the Ninth Annual International Conference on International Computing Education Research (ICER '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 71--78.

Digital Library

[25]

Richard E. Mayer. 2009. Multimedia Learning (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, USA.

Digital Library

[26]

Alok Mysore and Philip J. Guo. 2017. Torta: Generating Mixed-Media GUI and Command-Line App Tutorials Using Operating-System-Wide Activity Tracing. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 703--714.

Digital Library

[27]

John Paxton. 2002. Live Programming As a Lecture Technique. J. Comput. Sci. Coll. 18, 2 (Dec. 2002), 51--56.

Digital Library

[28]

Larissa Pschetz, Koji Yatani, and Darren Edge. 2014. TurningPoint: Narrative-driven Presentation Planning. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1591--1594.

Digital Library

[29]

Roman Rädle, Midas Nouwens, Kristian Antonsen, James R. Eagan, and Clemens N. Klokmose. 2017. Codestrates: Literate Computing with Webstrates. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 715--725.

Digital Library

[30]

Adalbert Gerald Soosai Raj, Jignesh M. Patel, Richard Halverson, and Erica Rosenfeld Halverson. 2018. Role of Live-coding in Learning Introductory Programming. In Proceedings of the 18th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research (Koli Calling '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 13, 8 pages.

Digital Library

[31]

Scott Rosenberg. 2015. The Strange Appeal of Watching Coders Code. Backchannel: WIRED https://www.wired.com/2015/08/the-strange-appeal-of-watching-coders-code/. (2015).

[32]

Marc J. Rubin. 2013. The Effectiveness of Live-coding to Teach Introductory Programming. In Proceeding of the 44th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 651--656.

Digital Library

[33]

Jeremy Warner and Philip J. Guo. 2017. CodePilot: Scaffolding End-to-End Collaborative Software Development for Novice Programmers. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1136--1141.

Digital Library

[34]

Sarah Weir, Juho Kim, Krzysztof Z. Gajos, and Robert C. Miller. 2015. Learnersourcing Subgoal Labels for How-to Videos. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 405--416.

Digital Library

[35]

Greg Wilson. 2018. How to Teach Programming (and Other Things): Live Coding. http://third-bit.com/teaching/live.html. (2018).

Digital Library

Cited By

Strickroth SMonga MLonati VBarendsen ESheard JPaterson J(2024)Scalable Feedback for Student Live Coding in Large Courses Using Automatic Error GroupingProceedings of the 2024 on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3649217.3653620(499-505)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649217.3653620
Manesh D(2024)Understanding and Supporting Code PerformancesProceedings of the 16th Conference on Creativity & Cognition10.1145/3635636.3664623(21-24)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3635636.3664623
Manesh D(2024)Daniel Manesh: Supporting Code Performances2024 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VL/HCC60511.2024.00060(389-391)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/VL/HCC60511.2024.00060
Show More Cited By

Improv: Teaching Programming at Scale via Live Coding
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools

Recommendations

Improv for Computer Scientists: (Abstract Only)
SIGCSE '18: Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

Improvisation is viewed by many people as jazz musicians jamming in the early morning hours or comedians ad-libbing to create a funny skit, but it is so much more. Improv is about listening and moving a conversation (or music) forward in a positive and ...
ImproV: A System for Improvisational Construction of Video Processing Flow
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. Part IV: Interacting in Various Application Domains

ImproV is a video compositing system for live video. It uses a dataflow diagram to represent the video processing flow and allows performers to edit the diagrams even while the video is running. Traditional live video is limited to video editing, but ...
DanceCraft: A Music-Reactive Real-time Dance Improv System
MOCO '24: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Movement and Computing

Automatic generation of 3D dance motion, in response to live music, is a challenging task. Prior research has assumed that either the entire music track, or a significant chunk of music track, is available prior to dance generation. In this paper, we ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

L@S '19: Proceedings of the Sixth (2019) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale

June 2019

386 pages

ISBN:9781450368049

DOI:10.1145/3330430

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 24 June 2019

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed limited

Conference

L@S '19

L@S '19: Sixth (2019) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale

June 24 - 25, 2019

IL, Chicago, USA

Acceptance Rates

L@S '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 24 of 70 submissions, 34%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 117 of 440 submissions, 27%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

16
Total Citations
View Citations
873
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)176
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)23

Reflects downloads up to 24 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Strickroth SMonga MLonati VBarendsen ESheard JPaterson J(2024)Scalable Feedback for Student Live Coding in Large Courses Using Automatic Error GroupingProceedings of the 2024 on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3649217.3653620(499-505)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649217.3653620
Manesh D(2024)Understanding and Supporting Code PerformancesProceedings of the 16th Conference on Creativity & Cognition10.1145/3635636.3664623(21-24)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3635636.3664623
Manesh D(2024)Daniel Manesh: Supporting Code Performances2024 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VL/HCC60511.2024.00060(389-391)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/VL/HCC60511.2024.00060
Wang AHead AZhang AOney SBrooks C(2023)Colaroid: A Literate Programming Approach for Authoring Explorable Multi-Stage TutorialsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581525(1-22)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581525
Zhang AChen YOney S(2023)VizProg: Identifying Misunderstandings By Visualizing Students’ Coding ProgressProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581516(1-16)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581516
Casseau CFalleri JDegueule TBlanc X(2023)MOON: Assisting Students in Completing Educational Notebook Scenarios2023 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VL-HCC57772.2023.00026(157-167)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/VL-HCC57772.2023.00026
Alahmadi M(2023)VID2XML: Automatic Extraction of a Complete XML Data From Mobile Programming ScreencastsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.318889849:4(1726-1740)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2022.3188898
Alahmadi M(2022)VID2META: Complementing Android Programming Screencasts with Code Elements and GUIsMathematics10.3390/math1017317510:17(3175)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2022
https://doi.org/10.3390/math10173175
Ma YQi BXu WWang MDu BFan H(2022)Integrating Real-Time and Non-Real-Time Collaborative ProgrammingProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35675637:GROUP(1-19)Online publication date: 29-Dec-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3567563
Kim JChoi YXia MKim J(2022)Mobile-Friendly Content Design for MOOCs: Challenges, Requirements, and Design OpportunitiesProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3502054(1-16)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3491102.3502054
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents