"Jupyter-Notebook-as-Script": Investigating the Nature and Impact of Implicit Collaboration Scripts in Computational Notebooks

There are a variety of CSCL scripts that offer different levels of flexibility, ranging from high-structured guidance towards low-rigidity support. This study is grounded in the view that scripts should be designed with a certain degree of structuredness, and we aim to examine the presence of implicit scripts based on data collected from collaborative programming activities in authentic classroom settings. By extracting the task dependencies within Jupyter notebooks, we adopted Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) to operationalize the concept of implicit scripts. Next, we analyzed the group interaction data and measured their collaboration strategy alignment with the implicit scripts. Notably, we found that introducing a planning phase significantly improved groups' adherence to the implicit scripts. Qualitative data were reported to triangulate our findings. We discuss pedagogical and technological implications for more general CSCL contexts.