Computer Science Students' Experiences of Learning Technical WritingIn-PersonMSIGlobal
Computer science students regularly produce technical writing, whether it’s commit messages; issues, feature requests or bug reports; user- or developer-facing documentation; research papers; reports; or other forms of writing. Post-secondary educators have published papers about curriculum and course designs that teach technical writing and other communicative skills but little work has investigated computer science students’ perspectives on what technical writing skills they are learning, how they are learning them, and how they are experiencing this learning. In this lightning talk, we will provide an overview of a semester-long qualitative interview and reflective journaling study that we are conducting with upper-year computer science students to learn more about their experiences, attitudes, and beliefs related to learning technical writing. We aim to answer two research questions 1) How do Anonymous University computer science undergraduate students describe their technical writing experiences? What are their reflections on these experiences? and 2) What are Anonymous University computer science undergraduate students’ attitudes and beliefs about learning how to write technical documents in computer science courses? Through this lightning talk we hope to share our preliminary findings and connect with collaborators who share our interest in the teaching and learning of technical writing for computing students.