@eaplmx@twtxt.net Sure! You should be able to download the paper from ResearchGate. If that doesn’t work let me know and I can get it to you some other way. Note that the link is to a workshop proceedings so you’ll have to flip through that to find our paper (the other papers are interesting too!)
Reading over it again, I’m realizing that my memory of what we included is pretty skewed, oops 😕 We did survey some CS education literature to get a sense for how long it took to learn to program according to educators, but it looks like we left out that survey (for lack of space I think? but also because of the audience). The guesstimate about how long it takes to learn a natural language is sourced from the US Department of State. I’ll have to dig through my notes to find where I got the corresponding guesstimate about learning to program.
I totally agree with you about diversity being a very important factor. I definitely have not paid this due attention in the writings I’ve done about CS education. Two links that might be of interest to you that I stumbled on recently:
- A blog post suggesting there’s really no such thing as “learning to code”. People learn how to program in a specific domain, and a good fraction of what they learn is not transferable to another domain (the blog posts goes a bit into why that might be). So learning programming is a much more nuanced pursuit
- Amy J. Ko, a CS education researcher at the University of Washington in the US whose interests and work includes the relationship between diversity issues and computing.
Wish I had a better answer for you!