An Initial Analysis of the Research on Interest and Introductory Programming : A Systematic Review of this Literature

This Research Full Paper presents a review of the literature related to novices’ interest in learning to code. Students’ interest in this topic has been mentioned in the Computer Science Education (CSE) field since the 1990s. Although it got the attention of computing faculty and shaped a wide number of proposals, students’ disinterest remains a complex struggle in Computer Science (CS) courses. On the other hand, we still have little knowledge about what theoretical concepts and methods of research are adopted by researchers who study interest, particularly among novices in programming. As an attempt to close this gap, we carried out a systematic review process to identify frequent assumptions and methodological decisions aiming to establish a sense of what happened in the last seventeen years in this research field. Based on our review, the findings revealed that although a high number of contributions is propagated, most of them are based on lesson learned reports that fail in producing reliable evidences to substantiate the effectiveness of some proposals. The analysis of the 36 publications considered relevant to our systematic review revealed that there is not a convergent understanding between CSE researchers of what is interest and how to measure. Not many of them study interest based on specific theories or observe how students’ interest changes over time. So, although we have found many publications referring to practical and experimental applications, we could see that this research area is still fragmented and led by a bit of uncertainty about what really can sustain novices more interested in learning coding.