Toward Mutual Theory of Mind as a Foundation for Co-Creation

Despite increasing emphasis on the importance of helping people to understand how computers work, success in teaching new programmers to properly understand languages and how they behave has been limited. Our work focuses on how the cognitive science concept of theory of mind could be applied to better teach computational thinking. We achieve this by creating a prototype that builds a theory of mind for the user’s misconceptions in the context of beginning programming, and then leverages that as a tool for helping the user to build a more accurate mental model of the prototype itself.