SI Seminar by Luca Chiodini
Talk: A Curated Inventory of Programming Language Misconceptions
Online
Thu, May 6, 2021
Luca Chiodini presenting “A Curated Inventory of Programming Language Misconceptions” at the USI Software Institute.
Recorded Talk
Abstract
In the last decades, several studies have highlighted how novice programmers exhibit a surprisingly large amount of misconceptions: wrong beliefs about how things truly work. When professors, TAs, and teachers know which misconceptions their students are likely to hold, they can help them better and challenge those wrong conceptions to induce conceptual change. With this in mind, we are building progmiscon.org: an attempt to systematically document and present what we call ‘programming language misconceptions’, a focused subset of programming misconceptions. For correctness, we ground them into the corresponding programming language specification. For value, we enrich them with information that can be useful to instructors such as common symptoms. We explicitly welcome feedback and contributions to the collection by everyone at the SI!