Don't Just Paste Your Stacktrace: Shaping Discussion Forums in Introductory CS Courses

Abstract

Discussion forums are invaluable resources when scaling up undergraduate CS courses to larger class sizes. However, passive incorporation of discussion forums is not a silver bullet, as these platforms tend to devolve into places of shallow engagement. To aid our understanding of the factors that influence the nature of these interactions, we collected data from three CS1/CS2 forums. We obtained survey responses from the course instructors and performed a content analysis of the question-response pairs across all the courses. The results suggest that students' help-seeking patterns are influenced by the course curriculum, mode of delivery, and the existence of other help-seeking avenues. The findings also shed light on common strategies used by instructors to incentivize productive student-teaching staff and student-student interactions (e.g., instructing students to describe their debugging questions in detail, asking teaching staff to respond with hints/questions instead of direct answers). This poster presents a series of takeaways that can inform CS educators' choices around discussion forums.