Vviewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/1941487.1941499
education
reaching Learners Beyond
our hallowed halls

The Vast MaJorIty of our efforts in computing education re- volve around formal learn- ing environments. By virtue of where computing courses and programs are offered, much of our work is centered on the undergraduate curriculum in colleges and universities. Recently, increased attention has been given to computing education throughout elementary and secondary education in efforts to broaden participation in the field and address concerns about the student pipeline. However, by focusing exclusively on these formal settings, we may be missing an opportunity to reach the millions of people who find computing outside of academia’s hallowed halls and are left to teach themselves through informal educational activities.

In this column, I focus on adults actively working in a traditionally non-computing discipline who, nonetheless, develop scripts or programs as part of their activities. These end-user programmers provide a canonical example of people engaged in informal computing education. Examples include accountants who write spread-sheet formulas and macros, biologists who create programs to simulate models or facilitate data analysis, and graphic designers who produce scripts to automate repetitive and tedious tasks. Disciplinary differences aside, a common characteristic of people in these examples is that their formal academic training is in something

these end-user
programmers provide
a canonical example
of people engaged in
informal computing
education.

other than computing. Their knowledge of the computing fundamentals, and more specifically programming, is built largely from self-taught experiences and advice from peers.

Why should we be interested in
these domains? At the very least,
these informally trained individuals
account for a substantial portion of
the “computing pie.” Estimates for
the U.S. suggest there will soon be
more than 13 million self-described
programmers in the workplace, com-
pared to fewer than three million
professionally trained programmers. 5
The difficulties of learning to program
are well documented, and informal
learners are left to grapple with these
challenges in an environment very dif-
ferent from what best practices in edu-
cation recommend. We have the same
concerns for these programmers as
we have for those who are professional
software developers. For example, do
they create correct, robust, and reus-
able programs? Put simply, software
written by informally trained pro-
grammers has a user base, and coding
mistakes can cost valuable resources.
The educational and training needs of
this significant group of learners ap-
pear largely underserved by academic
institutions today.

an example in Graphic
and Web Design

Over the course of the last five years, my colleagues and I have conducted a series of studies to better understand how to support the educational needs of a group of informally trained programmers. We have focused our attention on professional graphic and Web designers who actively write code in some aspect of their job. 3 With educational backgrounds rooted in art and visual communication (and notably, very little STEM), the participants in our studies represent a unique outer bound of those who have a need for computing/programming later in life. It seems quite natural to require programming instruction for engineering majors, but rarely are similar requirements considered for art students.

One of the most striking observations about our study participants was the variety of their educational backgrounds. Even though those we interviewed shared similar job descriptions, they were trained in a wide variety of academic disciplines ranging from graphic design (as one might expect) to the humanities and the social scienc-