Philip Guo (UC San Diego)

The Design Space of Tools for Learning Programming at Scale

Computer programming is now a vital skill, but millions of people around the world struggle to learn it on their own without being able to get help from a human tutor. To address this significant access gap, I created Python Tutor, a pedagogical code visualization, and social learning system, which now visualizes code written in seven popular languages: Python, Java, C, C++, Ruby, JavaScript, and TypeScript. So far, over 2.5 million people in over 180 countries have used Python Tutor to visualize over 20 million pieces of code, making it by far the most widely-used system of its kind. This unique scale inspires new types of interactive systems for online learning, along with the ability to evaluate those systems on orders of magnitude more subjects than is possible in traditional lab studies.