A Kingdom for a Button: Students’ Thoughts about Buttons

In learning programming and learning to construct applications with graphical user interfaces, there exists a large body of concepts from everyday life that are used to guide students. In this study, we explore whether such concepts from everyday life that we might believe require no explanation are actually understood in different ways by students in an introductory browser-based applications course. Our analysis focuses on an elementary interactive element: a button. Analyzing survey data from 185 students, we observe that even the simple concept of a button may be understood in a myriad of ways and that the context in which the concept is represented significantly influences beliefs of how the concept behaves. Our results indicate that students can rarely disentangle a concept from the context, and that some even believe that the text shown on a button in a graphical user interface is used to define the functionality of the button.