Exploring co-creative partnerships with generative AI tools in programming education
Advancements in generative AI makes it possible to translate natural language into working programming code. The potentials of such technology pose important questions regarding what role it could play in the emergence of novel programming practices and how we should shape the future role of AI in the digital design industry. The proposed project will investigate how GAI-tools may be used as constructive resources for programming activities in creative design contexts by applying a notion that builds on a process of co-creativity between user and technology. This will involve examining how to support novice programmers in creative programming contexts to engage in the use of AI-based generation of programming code and design ideas - as processes of joint co-creativity and co-construction between human and artificial intelligence. Methodologically, the project will adopt a combination of design-oriented research approach and ethnographic research to understand the relational processes of use and creativity with GAI-tools, as well as to design technologies and methods to support these processes.
Funding agency
The Swedish Research Council Project time: 2024-2028
Martin Jonsson, professor in media technology, Södertörn University
Jakob Tholander, professor in Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University
Martin Jonsson, Jakob Tholander, Mattias Rost, Advait Sarkar, Ylva Fernaeus, Ahmed Kharrufa, and Thomas Ludwig. 2025. The End of Programming as We Know It: Envisioning Radical Re-Conceptualizations of Co-Coding with AI. In Adjunct Proceedings of the Sixth Decennial Aarhus Conference: Computing X Crisis (AAR Adjunct '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 30, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1145/3737609.3747093
Jakob Tholander and Martin Jonsson. 2023. Design Ideation with AI - Sketching, Thinking and Talking with Generative Machine Learning Models. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1930–1940. https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596014
Martin Jonsson and Jakob Tholander. 2022. Cracking the code: Co-coding with AI in creative programming education. In Proceedings of the 14th Conference on Creativity and Cognition (C&C '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 5–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3527927.3532801