A 3.5-year research-through-design project exploring how to make creative coding accessible, empowering, and genuinely student-centered for non-computing design students.
Interaction designers increasingly need programming skills, but traditional CS pedagogy wasn’t designed for them. Design students learn differently: they’re motivated by visual output, creative autonomy, and making things that help people. A lecture-and-exam model left many feeling like they’didn’t belong’ in technical spaces.
At the University of Sydney, the Interaction Design unit DECO1012 served around 400 students per year - mostly first-year undergraduates and postgraduate students from design backgrounds. The challenge: how do you design a programming curriculum that meets design students where they are, while building real technical competence?
We used a research-through-design methodology: building, deploying, studying, and rebuilding over three distinct cycles. Each cycle generated student interview data that fed directly into the next design iteration - a genuine feedback loop between research and practice.
My core contribution was the thematic meta-analysis: coding and interpreting over 60 student interviews conducted across all three research cycles. Using an ecological triangulation approach, I worked to surface the patterns that weren’t visible in any single cycle alone.
This meant sitting with a lot of complexity and contradiction. Some students found the open-ended format deeply empowering. Others found it anxiety-inducing. The challenge wasn’t to reconcile these, but to understand why both were true - and what it revealed about the conditions under which open-ended learning works.
“I found it was a turning point in my learning where I actually could freely explore.”
Student participant, Cycle 1The thematic analysis produced seven broad themes that together told a nuanced story about student attitudes toward open-ended programming. Rather than a simple “did it work?”, the answer was: it worked for some students, undermined others, and the difference had less to do with prior coding skill than with metacognitive confidence.
The meta-analysis revealed a consistent tension at the heart of open-ended blended learning: the same pedagogical choices that felt empowering to some students felt anxiety-inducing to others. The difference wasn’t about ability - it was about metacognitive confidence and knowing where you stand.
From the research, we distilled three actionable design principles for educators building open-ended programming curricula for design students:
This research contributed to an ongoing conversation in HCI education about how to design programming pedagogy that genuinely serves non-computing students. The CCCs platform reached over 1,250 students across three years, and the findings have since informed how the Interaction Design unit approaches open-ended assessment design.
For me personally, this project sharpened something I care about deeply: the intersection of research and teaching practice. Good research should change how you teach. Good teaching should raise questions worth researching. This project was both.
The published article is open access and available on Frontiers in Computer Science.