Coding Expediently: A Computationally Situated Epistemic Game

As physics educators integrate computational activities, they must attend to the overarching processes that students follow when interacting with computer code. We describe one such process, Coding Expediently, as an epistemic game that students might play with a goal of minimizing the amount of time or keystrokes required to carry out a set of programming steps. Playing this game reduces the time and cognitive load students devote to step-by-step interaction with computer code, leaving more time and cognitive load for bigger-picture sensemaking. We describe observations of two students playing this game during think-aloud interviews in which they completed an introductory Python tutorial. These students represent two differing technical backgrounds: rich experience with mathematics and no programming experience, and moderate experience with mathematics and rich programming experience outside of Python. We describe observations of these students playing this epistemic game selectively (even when they are aware of its benefits) and how they play this game in significantly different ways.