How people learn to program9 min read

“It's Weird That it Knows What I Want”: Usability and Interactions with Copilot for Novice Programmers

James Prather, Brent N. Reeves, Paul Denny, Brett A. Becker, Juho Leinonen, Andrew Luxton-Reilly, et al. · 2023 · ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 31(1), Article 4, 1–31

Nineteen beginners were watched using Copilot on a real assignment; the problem was rarely that the code was wrong — it was that they could not tell.

Read the paper ↗doi:10.1145/3617367 ↗

The short version

→Nineteen students in an introductory C++ course each spent an observed session solving a real Minesweeper-style assignment with GitHub Copilot, thinking aloud, followed by interviews.
→Two interaction patterns get named: shepherding — spending your effort steering the tool toward the code you already had in mind — and drifting — accepting, adapting, deleting and re-accepting with no plan underneath.
→The recurring difficulty is metacognitive. Students could not judge whether a suggestion was correct, several could not say what the code they had just accepted did, and some expected Copilot to tell them whether their solution was right.
→Suggestions were also experienced as an interruption: constant, too long, and arriving mid-thought.

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