#176: Innovation, Iteration, and the Interaction Order: When Is It Okay to Copy Code?

Computer science education contexts are microcosms for studying broader tech culture. As students learn programming, they are shaping—and shaped by—the normative expectations for creating, contributing, and innovating. This paper explores norms and obligations in an elementary computer science context and analyzes a tension between how children learn how, when, and whether to copy code. Through interaction analysis of 20 hours of video-recorded lessons in a second-grade classroom, we examined students’ sense-making about geometric patterns in two different mathematics-coding tasks. We found that sense-making about iteration, unitizing, and variables involved interpreting a mixed message about when it is okay to copy code. We discuss this mixed message in terms of a relationship between social and computational ordering of interactions. We then draw implications for teaching and learning computer science in an era of rapid technological innovation and shifting sociocomputational norms.