Participant quotes, minimal editing, coded
Novice programming students engage in help-seeking behavior to find information and learn about programming concepts. Among the available resources, generative AI chatbots appear powerful, widely accessible, and comforting to programming students. The programming education community is moving to integrate them into the classroom despite standing fears that students will be miseducated through chatbot usage. However, our understanding of how novice programming students trust GenAI chatbots and the factors influencing their selection as learning resources is still nascent. This study contributes to this rapidly growing body of knowledge by investigating novice programming students' learning resource selection process for learning with GenAI chatbots. We recruited 20 novice programming students and tasked them with learning a programming topic using ChatGPT with GPT-3.5 (n=10) or a human tutor via Discord (n=10), during which we collected think-aloud data and debriefs. We found that our participants had slightly different and persuasive perceptions of ChatGPT's strengths and weaknesses, considered its usefulness as situational, were reluctant to use it to learn new topics, and generally preferred other, more trustworthy learning resources. We provide guidance to instructors on integrating LLM chatbots into their curriculum and to pedagogical chatbot developers on how their products can best serve novice programming students.