"I spent 14 hours debugging just one assignment": Toward Computer-Mediated Personal Informatics for Computer Science Student Mental Health
Date
2025-04-25
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Abstract
Anxiety and depression rates in Computer Science (CS) students are double those of other undergraduates and 5-10 times higher than the general population. However, factors contributing to the elevated mental health issues in CS students remain unknown. To bridge this gap, we conducted need-finding interviews (N=20), which revealed that the complexity of debugging, along with imposter syndrome, are key contributors to stress and burnout. Participants expressed openness toward and feature preferences in a computer-based Personal Informatics (PI) tool to facilitate self-reflection. In response, we developed EmotionStream, an algorithm-assisted PI tool that provides both contextual and emotional insights based on individual behaviors. We found that participants rated their experience with the tool highly. Post-hoc analysis revealed that emotional states, augmented with contextual cues, show promise of predicting real-time stress. Based on our findings, we provide design implications for future PI tools to support CS student mental well-being.
Description
This article was originally published in Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’25, Yokohama, Japan, ACM ISBN 979-8-4007-1394-1/25/04. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713269.
© 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0).
Keywords
student, stress, affect, personal informatics, computer science, mental health
Citation
Chandrasekaran, Aishwarya, London Bielicke, Diya Shah, Harisha Janakiraman, and Matthew Louis Mauriello. “‘I Spent 14 Hours Debugging Just One Assignment’: Toward Computer-Mediated Personal Informatics for Computer Science Student Mental Health.” In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI ’25. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713269.