I-LABS faculty member Chantel Prat and her graduate student Iris Kuo are featured in this UW News Q&A feature. Their work concerns how the brains of adults, who have varying skill levels in computer programming, read lines of code in a computer programming language. The brain’s response to viewing errors in both the syntax (form) and semantics (meaning) of code appeared identical to those that occur when fluent readers process sentences on a word-by-word basis. This suggests a resemblance between how people learn computer and natural languages. Says Prat, “People have been talking about the gap between the way coding is taught and the way it’s best learned since at least the 1980s. Coding education originated in an engineering culture — specifically a software engineering culture. Moving forward, there’s good reason to support the idea of coding as learning a language, like learning to speak with computers. It should be taught like a language where you have elements of learning syntax, but you also have a lot of practice and “conversation” classes where you produce code in small groups. This also creates the option of using coding courses to fulfill second language requirements. There may not be a one-size-fits-all best practice for computer programming education, but I think it’s useful to understand the way different people learn through a second-language-learning model.”