

How did you learn to code? - aaronpk
http://caseorganic.com/how-did-you-learn-to-program

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salemh
For improving the survey:

I don't have the sources (a few hundred papers / articles) anymore, rather
this was for my own research in designing surveys for companies garnering
feedback from IT Director (mostly) levels.

For buy-in, Saliency of Questions and Subject Matter is key to engagement
(finishing the survey).

Assume that respondents will fade towards the end of the survey. Your most
important bits of information that you want to get from respondents should be
towards the beginning after a few "warm up" questions, so you get the data you
want without the drop-off.

Assume each question that is not open ended is ~ 1 minute:1 question. This
will help you determine length. Most engagement drops off ~10-15 minutes.
These questions INCLUDE Name, email, etc. (also, you may want to drop the name
req., as other commenters are pointing out).

Surveys of 20 minutes can be very "long" and have a much higher chance of not
finishing the survey without interest-engagement (video, graphics, saliency of
questions).

Research showed that length doesn't necessarily drop engagement, but poor
questions (relevance / saliency) does.

You will want to tighten up the questions, reduce the # of open-ended
questions (how are you going to compare all of those?)

You could instead make radio-text boxes (seeing you are using Google Forms),
such as: What did you first make the computer do: Option 1,2,3,4,5, Other (as
a text line).

What language could also be radio-boxes (to shorten respondents time to type).

You are also requiring random open-ended questions to be completed (red
asterix), or the form will not submit. You will lose much engagement this way.

Also note why you are gathering this (I assume for schooling), which would
perchance help with privacy concerns (though you don't need anyones real
name).

~~~
caseorganic
Thank you. Initially I sent this to people I knew, and the responses were to
be included in a book to be distributed to people interested in hearing
stories from programmers. Some of this is mentioned on the survey itself.

I'll make a new survey with less questions that address your concerns and
takes less time to fill out.

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emillon
I did not answer this survey, for the following two reasons:

\- there are a lot of open-ended questions. It's probably very long to fill
in.

\- required full name and email are a showstopper for me. Having a required
email is ok of course, but why do you make it required ? And what about the
full name ?

I believe that lots of people will share these concerns so I hope that it can
help you tune your survey so that it's more successful.

~~~
caseorganic
Thank you for your feedback! Made the full name optional and added an
anonymous checkbox. All responses will be made anonymous by default.

~~~
itsybitsycoder
Your anonymity checkboxes need to be converted to either a single checkbox or
a set of radio buttons. Right now you can select either or both options, which
doesn't make sense.

~~~
aaronpk
Thanks, good catch.

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greenyoda
You have to scroll all the way to the end before you find out what the
copyright terms are: a Creative Commons License that allows commercial use of
your replies. The fact that this is a potentially for-profit enterprise should
be clearly disclosed before you begin the survey.

Here, for convenience, are the license terms:

 _By submitting this story you license this work under a Creative Commons
Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US> _

Which says:

    
    
       You are free:
    
        to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
        to Remix — to adapt the work
        to make commercial use of the work

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neilk
The survey is very focused on "firsts", like, "what was your first program?".
It's weird, would you ask a marathon runner what their first steps were like?

A lot of people have dabbled with code, and the first programs are always the
same. If you started in the BASIC era like me, it's

    
    
        10 PRINT "NEILK"
        20 GOTO 10
    

For others it might be making a button in VB or doing some little bit of
JavaScript interactivity. My point is, there's no difference between the first
program of someone who gives up after thirty seconds, and the first program of
someone who sticks with it for thirty years.

~~~
jacalata
I've seen people ask 'what was your first race', which I think is a better
equivalent. Answers vary from "high school track" to "a 5k walk for breast
cancer". Potential answers to "what was your first program" range from your
BASIC answer to my own "a quadratic equation solver on my TI-83". I find it
interesting, and when you are aiming to use the survey responses to tell
stories, I think you'll get some good material out of these questions. Even
reading the other comments here get you a lot of different 'first programs'.

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flatline
I first learned to program in BASIC on an Apple ][+ when I was about 10, but
never really followed through with it until I re-taught myself in my 20s,
starting with "Learning Perl". So, I wasn't sure how to answer;)

~~~
jimhart3000
My experience is really similar to yours. I just kind of worked both in
there...

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cheshire137
Requiring my full name and cities where I grew up caused me to become wary and
leave. That information can be used too easily on stupid sites that have
account "security" questions like that.

~~~
elliottcarlson
Personally, I never answer those account "security" questions with any kind of
information someone could find out easily via a social network, random public
documents or even social engineering attacks.

"What is your mothers maiden name?" "correct horse battery staple".

As a side bonus, it also makes support calls very amusing.

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xradionut
Survey asks too many personal questions for no reward or incentive.

~~~
jimhart3000
My reward was remembering things I haven't thought of in years (I remembered
halfway through about how satisfying moving the turtle in logo felt, or that I
had almost completely forgotten about the hypercard stuff I played with in
middle school).

~~~
dsuth
Hah! I completely forgot about my high school programming stuff!

I'm with you, the reward was remembering all the cool shit I did (started
programming at 4 on a C64), and the hopes that the info might be useful to
people starting out. I definitely wish there was less of a barrier to becoming
a programmer these days, although I think interpreted languages go some way
here.

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Jack000
My first program was in Python. I was in grade 10 and math homework consisted
of repetitive questions with the x/y/z changed.

I got tired of doing it on the calculator, so I put in the general equations
and just updated the variables. It felt good, almost like I had a superpower.

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notjustanymike
I learned in Stunt Island! Best game ever!

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0YcO25-tKU&noredirect=1](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0YcO25-tKU&noredirect=1)

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obviouslygreen
I actually forgot until recently that C in high school (self-taught) was _not_
the first exposure I had to programming. It was HyperCard! Granted, about five
years ago I actually found the original Mac I'd had and discovered I was a
truly, truly awful programmer in my first few months, but it did bring back a
lot of welcome nostalgia.

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vickytnz
You know about this site, right? <http://ilearnedtoprogram.com/>

~~~
richieb
Wow! Exactly what happened to me :)

~~~
kissickas
You realize that link returns a random response, right? I'm not sure what
you're referring to.

~~~
vickytnz
I mean in general, there are about 500 responses there. You can get permalinks
for all of them. (After doing a lot of page refreshes—and seeing a lot of
amazing stories from interning at the Swedish Defence centre to being inspired
by Gloria Steinem—I found mine
<http://ilearnedtoprogram.com/?id=4db7598635a76c8952000000> )

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harel
I actually enjoyed it. It was the first time I sat down and thought about that
journey and I was quite happy to share it. I don't mind about sharing my name
or other such information. Never bothered me. I find it easier sharing my real
name than trying to come up with a clever username.

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cl8ton
Too many personal Q's on the survey... so I laid it out here.

On a TRS-80 and the first program I wrote was a Pong knock-off in (GWBasic?
can't remember)

PEEK & POKE anyone?

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skore
Heck, if I could remember even half of the things this survey asks.

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CoachRufus87
...in HTML on GeoCities, because I wanted to make something cool.

