Perceptions of non-CS majors in intro programming: The rise of the conversational programmer

Despite the enthusiasm and initiatives for making programming accessible to students outside Computer Science (CS), unfortunately, there are still many unanswered questions about how we should be teaching programming to engineers, scientists, artists or other non-CS majors. We present an in-depth case study of first-year management engineering students enrolled in a required introductory programming course at a large North American university. Based on an inductive analysis of one-on-one interviews, surveys, and weekly observations, we provide insights into students' motivations, career goals, perceptions of programming, and reactions to the Java and Processing languages. One of our key findings is that between the traditional classification of non-programmers vs. programmers, there exists a category of conversational programmers who do not necessarily want to be professional programmers or even end-user programmers, but want to learn programming so that they can speak in the “programmer's language” and improve their perceived job marketability in the software industry.