The Impact Of Culture On Learner Behavior In Visual Debuggers

People around the world are learning to code using online resources. However, research has found that these learners might not gain equal benefit from such resources, in particular because culture may affect how people learn from and use online resources. We therefore expect to see cultural differences in how people use and benefit from visual debuggers. We investigated the use of one popular online debugger which allows users to execute Python code and navigate bidirectionally through the execution using forward-steps and back-steps. We examined behavioral logs of 78,369 users from 69 countries and conducted an experiment with 522 participants from 82 countries. We found that people from countries that tend to prefer self-directed learning (such as those from countries with a low Power Distance, which tend to be less hierarchical than others) used about twice as many back-steps. We also found that for individuals whose values aligned with instructor-directed learning (those who scored high on a "Conservation" scale), back-steps were associated with less debugging success.