CS+LS Team Wins a Best Paper Award at CHI’26

A Computer Science and Learning Sciences team led by fourth-year PhD student Caryn Tran earned a Best Paper Award at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’26), held April 13-17 in Barcelona, Spain.

CHI is the leading international conference on human-computer interaction. This year, Northwestern presented 16 papers, 12 posters, 4 workshops, and 2 interactivity demos.

Tran was first author of the winning paper “Starting From Scratch Again and Again: Tracing the Origins of High Schoolers’ Negative Perceptions of Block-Based Programming.” The work was co-authored by Kristin Fasiang, a third-year PhD student in Northwestern’s joint program in Computer Science and Learning Sciences; Max Kanwal (Stanford University); and Eleanor O'Rourke, associate professor of computer science at Northwestern Engineering and associate professor of learning sciences at Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy. Tran and Fasiang are members of the Delta Lab, an interdisciplinary research lab and design studio codirected by O’Rourke and Professors Elizabeth Gerber, Matthew Easterday, and Haoqi Zhang.

In this work—inspired by Tran’s time as a middle school computer science teacher based in Menlo Park, California—the team aimed to understand how educational programming tools like block-based programming shape K–12 students’ motivation to learn computer science. Block-based programming, Tran explained, can help beginners focus on problem solving and computational thinking instead of worrying about typing code correctly. Instead of typing code, students drag and drop code blocks that snap together like puzzle pieces to build programs.

In their qualitative study, the team analyzed the reflections of 17 high school students on nearly a decade of CS learning experiences, often marked by repeated introductions to block-based environments from grade to grade rather than progress to more advanced exercises and applications.

“Even though block-based programming has clear learning benefits, some high school students see these tools as childish, only capable of very basic functionality, or not ‘real programming,’” Tran said. “They want a deeper experience—and, based in part on what they’re absorbing from job listings, media, peers, and programming curricula, they believe they can only get it by learning syntax-heavy programming languages.”

Their study reflected Tran’s teaching experience. Balancing students’ motivation and learning had been her biggest challenge in the classroom, she said. When her students, ages 10 to 14, struggled to learn JavaScript and Python, Tran switched to a simpler block-based programming tool. But many of the students reacted negatively to this change and did not like being taught with blocks.

Block-based programming does not change what a computer can do, Tran emphasized. It is just a different way of writing the same kind of instructions. After the research team demonstrated how block-based tools could be used to build Android and iPhone applications, the high school students began to reconsider their earlier assumptions about what block-based programming can accomplish.

“We want students to feel interested in learning CS and to believe that what they are learning is meaningful,” Tran said. “Learning computer science is not only about learning languages. It is also about learning how to solve problems, organize logic, and describe processes in a way that a computer can follow. These skills matter no matter which programming language someone uses.”

Moving forward, Tran and the research team plan to test whether changes in tool design or new learning activities can shift students’ beliefs about programming. They also want to study whether changing these beliefs can increase students’ motivation to learn computer science.

“If we want educational tools to improve engagement and participation, we should design them not only to support what students learn, but also to support what students believe about what programming is and what they can do with it,” Tran said.