No abstract

Parsons problems are an increasingly popular method for helping inexperienced programmers improve their programming skills. In Parsons problems, learners are given a set of programming statements that they must assemble into the correct order. Parsons problems commonly use distractors, extra statements that are not part of the solution. Yet, little is known about the effect distractors have on a learner's ability to acquire new programming skills. We present a study comparing the effectiveness of learning programming from Parsons problems with and without distractors. The results suggest that distractors decrease learning efficiency. We found that distractor participants showed no difference in transfer task performance compared to those without distractors. However, the distractors increased learners cognitive load, decreased their success at completing Parsons problems by 26%, and increased learners' time on task by 14%.

Enabling middle school children to learn from code shared on the internet may provide computer science learning opportunities to those who would not otherwise have them. We augmented a programming environment designed for middle school children to automatically generate tutorials from code snippets in order to help users learn new programming skills. In our new system, users select code snippets from a program shared on the web and then complete an automatically generated tutorial in order to re-create that snippet within their own program. To evaluate the potential learning gains from our generated tutorials, we conducted a between-subjects study in which we evaluated the performance of children introduced to new programming constructs through automatically generated tutorials. Participants who used the automatically generated tutorials performed 64% better on a near transfer task compared to participants without generated tutorials.

To support children learning to use new software applications independently, tutorial systems should prevent errors and ensure that users are able to transfer tutorial skills to a new context effectively. In this paper, we describe the formative development and evaluation of on-request stencils, an interaction technique that both prevents children from making errors within a tutorial and significantly improves their ability to transfer tutorial skills to a related task. Using on-request stencils, users can attempt a task independently. If they encounter difficulty, users can request step by step tutorial overlays to guide them through the current task. In a study comparing tutorial performance, task performance, and attitudes, we found that users of on-request stencils successfully completed 47% more transfer tasks than users of persistent stencils. There were no significant differences between the two groups in tutorial performance or attitudes towards the software system.

Blocks-based environments are frequently used in settings where there is little or no access to teachers. Effective support for examples in blocks-based environments may help novices learn in the absence of human experts. However, existing research suggests that novices can struggle to use examples effectively. We conducted a study exploring the impacts of example-task similarity and annotation style on children's abilities to use examples in a blocks-based environment. To gain understanding of where and why children struggle, we examined the degree to which (1) children were able to map a task to its corresponding example, and (2) their programming behavior predicted task success. The results suggest that annotations improve task performance to an extent and that mappings and programming behavior can begin to explain the remaining problems novices have using examples.