Learning web development: challenges at an earlier stage of computing education

Abstract

Web development can provide a rich context for exploring computer science concepts and practicing computational creativity. However, little is known about the experiences that people have when first learning web development. In this paper, we investigate the help-seeking activity of forty-nine students in an introductory web development course. By applying content analysis to the help forums of the course, we characterize the challenges they encountered and sought help for, relating them to development, instruction, technology, content, and design issues. We apply a second level of content analysis to the development issues, identifying aspects of learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that challenged students most often. Finally, we identify several computational concepts that relate to these challenges, including notation, hierarchies and paths, nesting, parameters and arguments, and decomposition and abstraction. We conclude with a discussion on the implications of our findings for computing education.